Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!fts1!michael
From: michael@fts1.uucp (Michael Richardson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <1990Jul28.175223.11251@fts1.uucp>
Date: 28 Jul 90 17:52:23 GMT
References: <1990Jul21.091529.29557@lth.se> <1857@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <37713@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Fountain Technical Services, Ottawa, ON
Lines: 46

In article <37713@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes:
>Many sites will continue to run the software they are using now, and no amount
>of cajoling will cause them to install new, 8-bit compatible software.  In
>some cases, this is because the organization gives news and mail a low priority
>(doesn't bring in money, etc).  Many sites are still running obsolete software

  Agreed. My experience says that these people tend to be either terminal sites, or extremly heavily
loaded sites, whose future existance is not necessarily assured. (fts1's feed, nrcaer
is such a site)
  
>There is a very small incentive, unfortunately, for sites in English-speaking
>countries to install software to support 8-bit character sets.

  Sites in Canada, particularly the Canadian government would probably be
able to justify the time to support the use of french.

>few connections between the US and Europe -- most traffic across the Atlantic
>goes through uunet.  Character translation could be done on the uunet-mcsun
>link -- stripping accents on articles arriving from Europe, remapping
>characters

  So long as I can get a feed from uunet, untranslated. Obviously
the translation programs would be easiest to put into the batchers.

  I'm not exactly sure how ISO 10646 (is that the right number?) relates
to T61 and NAPLPS (which I'm quite familliar with), but I think that a method
of getting 8 bit data through a 7 bit site could be devised with the proper
set of filters.
  I just wish that uuencoded and tarmail could be better dealt with and 
transferred in binary form. 
  tar | compress | uuecode | *news* | uux <-Telebit-> uuxqt | *news* |
uudecode | uncompress | tar x

  Is a necessary evil, but perhaps the blow could be reduced somewhat. Particularly
if "*news*" involves batching and doing MORE compression..

>so when an American types braces in articles in comp.lang.c, readers in
>Europe see braces, instead of language-specific characters.

  And the rest of the world that receives stuff from uunet?

-- 
   :!mcr!:            | < political commentary currently undergoing Senate >
   Michael Richardson | < committee review. Returning next house session.  >
 Play: mcr@julie.UUCP Work: michael@fts1.UUCP Fido: 1:163/109.10 1:163/138
    Amiga----^     - Pay attention only to _MY_ opinions. -   ^--Amiga--^