🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <eaRsVB2w165w@blues.kk.sub.org> kosta@blues.kk.sub.org (Kosta Kostis) writes:

>If one decides to use ISO 8859-1 as the common character set for news
>one has support for 44 countries in the world (according to the standard).
>Should you use ISO 8859-x, add even more countries. Most of them
>"indo-european". If you stay with US ASCII the number is much lower.

>It would be all much nicer, if we had ISO 10646 - well at least for
>many of us.  :-)  But this will take much longer than adding support
>for ISO 8859-x. Using ISO 8859-x is a real nice migration path anyway.

  Shouldn't really take any longer if done correctly.  Certainly the
good folks at AT&T Bell Labs have shown that it works quite nicely.
The Bell Labs encoding for ISO-10646 appears to be the leading
contender for adoption by MIME as the conventional way to encode
ISO-10646 in MIME email -- and it would be just fine with either 7-bit
or 8-bit transport (if I understand Andrew Hume correctly).  Moreover,
the transported character set and the displayed character set need not
be the same.

  For example, one can transport text as ISO-10646 encoded into some
suitable 7-bit form even and then use ISO-8859-* fonts to display that
text and Japanese X0208 (etc.) fonts to display that text and can use
the public domain Vietnamese fonts (from sonygate.sony.com via
anonymous ftp) to display that text.

  I really really am opposed to ONLY handling the ISO-8859-* cases.
It is perfectly clear that we can handle the general problem quite
nicely now that ISO-10646 is almost done.  We should solve the general
problem.  Doing that will NOT necessarily take any more time.

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil