ietf-nntp Dealing with internationalization in NNTP

[Brian Hernacki]

Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> > A couple of issues I'd like to start with are:
> >
> > o the charset
> >
> > The current 977bis draft includes the CHARSET command to allow the
> > client and server to negotiate a charset. A couple folks (including me)
> > have posted as to why we think this is a bad idea. I would much rather
> > see us defined something like UTF8 as the default charset used. While I
> > heard from people who agreed with me on this, I didn't hear any
> > objections. Is this OK? Do poeple think this would be a bad thing? If
> > not should we change the draft?
> 
> As far as I understand, this only refers to protocol elements
> (parameters) in the NNTP protocol itself, not to the news articles
> themselves? I don't have much of an idea of what protocol elements
> are used and which of these need or may benefit from internationalization
> or localization (by the way, these words can be shortened to i18n
> and l10n). Also, I think there is some overlap with usenet, e.g.
> in respect to newsgroup names.

It affects things like error strings and search tokens which are
strictly protocol. I'll check the usenet-format stuff to see how they
are handling NG names.

> I would definitely prefer to use UTF-8 only for these things, but
> UTF-8 should be prescribed in a way that doesn't completely
> forbid local existing customs. For examlpe, an NNTP server
> should not refuse a command with a newsgroup name or something
> else just because it does not meet the syntactic constraints
> that an UTF-8 octet sequence does.

The current standard is ASCII only so I don't see a backwards
compatibility problem. Are suggesting a future revision might want to
use a different local encoding (like SJIS)? I'd be inclinded to have
977bis forbid that. It would just generate the kind of interoperability
problems we're trying to solve.

> > o a language specification/negotiation extension
> The IMAP model can definitely be used. For more information, please
> also see Harald Alvestrand's draft about the IETF charset policy,
> which contains quite a few recommendations about this topic (e.g.
> default language stuff which can be highly political,...).

Yeah. I kept up on that. I don't really have too much of a problem with
it. The biggest constraint is that any new IETF standard must "deal"
with charset in a definitive way. If we make the requirement that NNTP
is UTF-8 we cover that.

--brian