ietf-nntp Draft comments

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Thu Nov 16 06:18:45 PST 2000


In <ylaeb1exqg.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Also, if we add additional functionality to wildmat to express characters
>as their octal values, I'm in favor of using a syntax that also lets us
>represent Unicode.  I have no strong opinions on what that syntax should
>be, other than a mild preference to make it look vaguely C-like, so I'd
>prefer to leave it to the C standardization folks who are also on this
>list to recommend a good syntax based on their experience with C.

Remember that UTF-8 characters can occur in wildmats and represent
themselves, so your additional functionality is not essential. It would,
however, enable wildmats expressed in that way to be human readable at
sites that did not have machinery to display the genuine Chinese stuff.
OTOH, those sites will still have the same problem if they get to see
Chinese characters in naked UTF-8 (i.e. not using your escape convention).
Doubtless there are going to be standard ways for user agents to display
arbitrary UTF-8 using just ASCII. That should not be defined in our
standard of course, but if there already exist some widely use conventions
for this (do there?) then a mention might be in order.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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