[NNTP] AD guidance on NNTP i18n issues

[Charles Lindsey]

In <871x9yxpk1.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> I think you want to do that mainly by punting it to Usefor. Something like

>> "It is anticipated that extensions or replacements to RFC 1036 will
>> introduce I18N features, notably in connection with newsgroup-names, the
>> information needed for the LIST NEWSGROUPS output etc. etc. etc. Insofar
>> as these extension may make use of UTF-8, this present standard has
>> hopefully made suitable provision. However, it is not precluded that
>> such developmens may require further extensions to this standard."

>We should say something about future work, yes, but we need to spell out
>what the problems are specifically.  The above is not adequate in my
>opinion, as I understand the guidance we've received and the issue,
>although it's not *far* off.  I would rather specifically talk about why
>those three things in particular are an issue and then talk about what
>some future article standard might do later.

Sure, that text was just intended as a skeleton on which you could hang
specific technical points that need to be incluided.


>That's what I said.  :)

>> Yes indeed. But be careful not to commit to any particular final
>> solution.  I am sure we all believe that UTF-8 is the way to go, but we
>> may not succeed in carrying the rest of the world with us.

>If we're not going to commit to UTF-8 as the solution, we should clearly
>state that if the solution ends up being something other than UTF-8,
>further changes to the NNTP standard may also be required.  Maybe say
>something along the lines of "this standard anticipates and allows for a
>future standardization on UTF-8 for newsgroup names and descriptions; if
>some other solution is chosen, further changes to the NNTP standard in
>this area may be required."

Yes that is fine (it is pretty close to part of what I wrote).

Note that one of the technical points which could follow on from that is
that if UTF-8 were to be used for newsgroup-names, some form of
normalization would be essential (via *-prep or whatever) because it would
be quite infeasible to expect NNTP implementations to recognise that two
newsgroup-names were in fact alternative 'spellings' of the same
newsgroup. Essentially the same problem as comparing message identifiers,
for which we had to put some really ugly syntax into Usefor.

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