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From: Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.misc
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <1990Jul21.091529.29557@lth.se>
Date: 21 Jul 90 09:15:29 GMT
References: <1990Jul13.022224.25441@lth.se> <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <+7Y$AV&@rpi.edu>
Sender: newsuser@lth.se (LTH network news server)
Organization: Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden
Lines: 44

In article <+7Y$AV&@rpi.edu> kibo@pawl.rpi.edu (James 'Kibo' Parry) writes:
>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.
>

Yes it is time to start thinking about using an international character set
in netnews. This means that 8bit bytes are used but not that binary files
can be transmitted without encapsulation. Binary files must still be
converted into a encoded format that can be check and unpacked in a controlled
manner.

Only one character set should be used for transmitting articles as it is 
impossible for everyone to handle all in the world. In european talks about
a character set to use for mail ISO 10646 is the best candidate and it
should be fine for netnews also. ISO 10646 has both ASCII and ISO 8859-1 as
true subsets and that will easy compatability problems.

Local netnews readers will have to convert from ISO 10646 into the character
set used locally.

Using ISO 10646 allows nearly every letter in the world to be written.

    Dan

-- 
Dan Oscarsson                              Department of Computer Science
                                           Lund Institute of Technology
e-mail:  Dan@dna.lth.se                    Box 118
                                           S-221 00 Lund, Sweden