[NNTP] Internationalisation, attempt 2

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Wed May 18 19:09:05 PDT 2005


Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> writes:
> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>>    o  Header values SHOULD use US-ASCII or an encoding based on it such
>>       as RFC 2047 [RFC2047] until such time as another approach has been
>>       standardised. 8-bit encodings (including UTF-8) MAY be used but
>>       are likely to cause interoperability problems.

> I don't think this is strong enough. 8-bit encoded Subjects are almost
> guaranteed to cause trouble, I'd think the paragraph should only allow
> UTF-8 and RFC-2047.

I think the current text is as strong as we can get away with.  8-bit
encoded Subjects are in widespread use on Usenet currently, so clearly
someone is using them with sufficient interoperability to continue doing
so.  I agree that this should eventually stop, but RFC 2047 is
sufficiently unappealing that even though it's the right thing to do, I'm
quite sure that mandating it in our standard will just mean that the
standard says something other than what people do in practice, which is
what we're trying to avoid.

>>    o  The character set of article bodies SHOULD be indicated in the
>>       article headers, and this SHOULD be done in accordance with
>>       MIME.

> Please consider "MUST" for the second "SHOULD". I see no sane solution
> other than MIME at this time, and MIME is the widest spread.

I think the second SHOULD is only reflecting the first, since otherwise it
implies that the whole thing is a SHOULD.  If Clive feels like trying to
reword this to indicate that *if* the character set is indicated, it MUST
be done via MIME, I would have no objections, but I'm not sure the
clarification is worth the trouble.

>>    o  The newsgroup description SHOULD be in US-ASCII or UTF-8 unless
>>       and until a successor to RFC 1036 standardised other encoding
>>       arrangements. 8-bit encodings other than UTF-8 MAY be used but are
>>       likely to cause interoperability problems.

> Again, these paragraphs ought to read "8-bit encodings other than UTF-8
> SHOULD NOT be used, because they are ...(interoperability)..."

See my other message on that.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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