[NNTP] Re: AD guidance on NNTP i18n issues

[Mark Crispin]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Russ Allbery wrote:
>   o The current growing use of MIME for the article format, but also the
>     substantial use of local character sets in article headers and (less
>     commonly) untagged article bodies.

Recommendations are needed.  Suggest:
  1) untagged non-ASCII character sets SHOULD NOT appear in headers and
     bodies.
  2) to make (1) feasible, USEFOR is given a task to determine how 8-bit
     characters in headers are to be tagged.
  3) clients encountering untagged non-ASCII characters SHOULD interpret
     these as UTF-8, and MAY interpret these as the client local character
     set instead.

>   o The mix of character sets used in newsgroup descriptions.

Similar recommendations: ASCII, UTF-8, or tagged charset.  Clients should 
not be obliged to guess.

>   o The current pure-ASCII convention for newsgroup names, which is
>     widespread but not entirely universal.

Recommendation: any non-ASCII expansion be Unicode, either using UTF-8 or 
punycode.

>   o The need, long-term, for standardization of character sets, tagging,
>     and encoding for articles, for standardization on UTF-8 for newsgroup
>     descriptions, and for standardization on UTF-8 and canonicalization
>     of newsgroup names.  We should also clearly state that all of those
>     issues require work done in conjunction with the article format
>     standard.

Agreed.

> * We should strongly discourage any use of newsgroup names that would
>   interfere with the long-term canonicalization goals, since that's the
>   area where a bad choice may be hard to reverse later.  Personally, I'm
>   leaning towards saying that newsgroup names SHOULD be US-ASCII for the
>   time being

Agreed.  IMAP does the same thing for mailbox names, although allows a 
form of Unicode (Modified UTF-7 -- we would have used punycode if it had 
existed at the time).

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
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