Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!lth.se!newsuser From: Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: New USENET header: Language Message-ID: <1990Dec29.093002.10739@lth.se> Date: 29 Dec 90 09:30:02 GMT References: <1990Dec27.191142.22810@fxgrp.fx.com> Sender: newsuser@lth.se (LTH network news server) Organization: Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden Lines: 32 In article zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes: >>>Putting the character set in the header limits us to only one language per >>>article. I'd much prefer to see some escape mechanism in the body. >>>This would allow things like an english posting with a proper xxx >>>language name in the signature. > >>No it doesn't. There are character sets such as ISO 10646 or even to >>some extent the ISO 8859-X stanards that support multiple languages. >>Adding the header would be easy and it would be relatively easy for an >>X based newsreader to change encodings/fonts for different articles. > >Ok, I should have said "...limits us to one char set per article". So not >one language, but fewer languages or at less efficiency. Even ISO 10646 >can not support language x and y for any x and y. The only character set needed is ISO 10646. It covers nearly every character in the world. If we use ISO 10646 as THE ONLY CHARCTERSET in articles everybody will always know what character set is used and it can be used both in headers and body. Instead of having thousands of translation tables for each possible character set, we only need to know how to translate from one to the local one used at a site. Also articles in ascii or ISO 8859-1 can directely be used as they are true subsets of ISO 10646. Dan -- Dan Oscarsson Department of Computer Science Lund Institute of Technology e-mail: Dan@dna.lth.se Box 118 S-221 00 Lund, Sweden