🚀 go-pugleaf

Damon (dhd@exnet.co.uk) wrote:

: Yes but *LISTEN*!  8-bit only makes it right for (say) European
: languages.  It hardly lets Chinese or Japanese speakers avoid the
: `spelling mistakes' as you put it.

Chinese and Japanese already have several encodings into character
sets that can be sent around through netnews - the fj.* news hierarchy
carries quite a bit of stuff in it right now.  As it happens the fj
groups chose a 7 bit encoding, but that doesn't remove the need for
extra tools (from a Latin alphabet point of view) to read them.

The ideal news reader would be flexible enough to treat the various
character set encodings sensibly and not put undue burdens on the
news posting software to get all sorts of headers right.  So if I'm
reading an article in sfnet.* the } is a Finnish character, but in
news.admin it's a right brace, and in relcom.* it's something Cyrillic.
If people do post with MIME headers that explicitly set the language
and character encoding that's better, but for most distributions there's
a sensible default that can be under the control of the news reader.

  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
        Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 GLOB