🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BzAxzJ.7np@sci.kun.nl> lwj@cs.kun.nl (Luc Rooijakkers) writes:

>The next nn version will use MIME header tagging to indicate the
>character set used. It will actually refuse to post 8-bit characters
>without such headers (they will be added automatically if you tell
>nn what character set to use).

Great.  

  It would also be useful to mark the 7-bit characters as US-ASCII or
ISO-646-N or whatever they really are.  That way other news readers
would have a good chance at using the right glyph for the variant
characters.  (Not that I'd endorse using ISO-646-* if ISO-8859-* were
available on those systems, but there will be some 646-only terminals
and such for a while yet. :-)

>By the way, isn't it time to create a news.8bit group :-) This subject
>has been cropping up in lots of newsgroups during the last few weeks.

  Discussion seems to have settled down in comp.std.internat and I
don't see any particularly good reason to move it.  If it should move,
lets not use the term "8-bit" in the name since we're also trying to
support ISO-10646 and other wide character sets.  A name like
alt.usenet.mime might not be bad since the consensus appears to be
that some kind of MIME-derivative is the approach to adopt for USENET
news.

  I should mention that some freely distributable software (called
"metamail") that helps implement MIME support for email packages is
available by anonymous ftp from thumper.bellcore.com -- I'm sure the
Metamail package would be just as useful for newsreader software.

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil