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From: Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <1990Jul23.094449.21187@lth.se>
Date: 23 Jul 90 09:44:49 GMT
References: <1990Jul13.022224.25441@lth.se> <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <+7Y$AV&@rpi.edu> <1990Jul21.091529.29557@lth.se> <1857@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Sender: newsuser@lth.se (LTH network news server)
Organization: Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden
Lines: 56

In article <1857@krafla.rhi.hi.is> frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) writes:
>
>Some possible solutions:
>
>(2)  On every machine the article is translated into one of the ISO 8859/x
>series of character sets.  8859/1 would probably be most used, as it covers
>most of the languages of Western Europe.  8859/2, 8859/3, 8859/4 etc. would
>solve the needs of those using Greek, various Eastern European languages and
>(I think) Hebrew and Arabic.  This would not solve the problem of those using
>a 16-bit character set.  Also, I am not sure if Esperanto is included in any
>of the ISO 8859/x standards.
>
>(3)  All text is transmitted according to the ISO 10646 standard.  This has
>one advantage compared to (2) - it allows the transmission of documents
>containing 16-bit characters, as well as documents containing characters from
>more than one of the 8859/x standards.  For example, one could send a message
>with the first part in Russian and the second part in Greek.
>
>My opinion is that (3) is more of a long-term goal - for 95 % of users of
>Usenet, (2) is all that is needed.
>
I think (3) is better.
(2) is more or less a subset of (3) and it would not be much more work
to implement (3) than (2).
Using (3) we have one character set only and an article can contain any
character. ISO 10646 can be sent in way so that ascii and iso 8859-1
articles can be sent without any change.
Also if ISO 10646 is choosen if will fit well with the international
sendmail patches that is under development.
If we choose (2) we will have to change to (3) in a few years.

--
Changes to netnews is somewhat different from mail. In netnews the
articles are stored in a central database used both for reading and for
sending the articles onward to the next site. This means that we cannot
convert incoming articles into the local character set used at a site,
instead each newsreader must do the convertion from ISO 10646 into
local character set.

To handle "old" sites that cannot handle 8-bit articles the articles will
have to be converted into ascii. So backbone sites must upgrade their
software to allow 8-bits through to allow tgis to work.

--
When the patches for international sendmail that I and one in Denmark is
developing is ready they will include convertion routines that could
probably be used in a netnews reader.

   Dan


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