ietf-nntp Dealing with internationalization in NNTP

[Brian Hernacki]

Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> It's not only what the standard says. The FTP standard also was
> ASCII only, but people used all kinds of other things for filenames.
> The solution there was basically to say that it's okay to use
> other things among "private parties", but for the Internet as a
> whole, it's UTF-8. Such a policy was facilitated by the fact that
> it's fairly easy and safe to identify UTF-8 (for some details,
> see my report at
>         http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/mml/mduerst/papers.html#IUC11-UTF-8).

It'd be curious to know how many existing implementations use non-ASCII
charsets for things like NG names. I'd be suprised if the number was
very high.

What I imagined is that folks who want to do local experimental
verisions on non UTF-8 charsets could continue to do so. They just
couldn't claim to be 977bis compliant. Just like they can't claim to be
977 compliant now. All this means is they cannot assume compatibility
with people who are compliant. I don't think we need to say this
explicitly since thats the whole idea of a standard.


--brian