Xref: utzoo news.software.b:5166 news.misc:5014
Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!umich!yale!cmcl2!phri!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!rpi!kibo
From: kibo@pawl.rpi.edu (James 'Kibo' Parry)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.misc
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <+7Y$AV&@rpi.edu>
Date: 20 Jul 90 22:01:48 GMT
References: <1990Jul13.022224.25441@lth.se> <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Organization: The Wacky World of Kibology.  Only in Schenectady.
Lines: 45

In article <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
>In article <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> greyham@hades.ausonics.oz.au (Greyham Stoney) writes:
>>Why don't all you people divert your energies into making your news system
>>handle 8 bit news rather than developing new and incompatible ways of
>>bitbashing your files into a format that both news and your unpacking program
>>(be it /bin/sh, sed, awk or whatever) can cope with?.
>
>8 bit news would help only slightly with things OTHER than the transmission
>of binary files via news.   Seven bit is basically doing the job now;
>the remaining issues (envelope consistency, line lengths, character sets,
>paragraph wrapping etc) aren't going to be solved by going to 8 bits.

Going to eight bits WOULD be nice for people using languages other than
English;  as it is now, if you're in, say, Finland, and you have a terminal
that does the Finnish variant of ASCII, people outside Finland are going
to see braces, brackets, backslashes, etc., wherever you say something
with an accented character.

Hoever, there are some good 8-bit character sets (IBM PC's, HP's,
ECMA-94 Latin, etc.) which could be used so that when someone in Germany
types an "o" with an umlaut, in France it'll appear as an "o" with an
umlaut and not as a question mark or a bracket or something.  Each foreign
character could have exactly one respresentation, as opposed to the
current scheme where some systems use ASCII, some use the Swedish variant,
etc...

Doing this would probably be best handled by (a) picking a standard (let's
say we decide that non-English characters will be located in the ECMA character
set.) and then (b) we either give everyone in the world a terminal that
can display them (which seems very unfeasible) or else we just build into
the next versions of the news-reading software a little option that maps
the plus-128 characters onto the PC, HP, ECMA, ASCII, whatever character
set as it displays articles.

I'm sure someone will be able to poke holes in this idea, but it seems like
something we should at least consider, given that the United States no
longer accounts for as much of the Usenet readership as it used to.

Comments?

-- 
james "kibo" parry, 138 birch lane, scotia, ny 12302 <-- close to schenectady.
kibo@pawl.rpi.edu            _________________________________________________
kibo%pawl.rpi.edu@rpi.edu   / Kibology    /  Anything I say is my opinion,
userfe0n@rpitsmts.bitnet   /  is better! /   and is the opposite of Xibo's.