Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!lth.se!newsuser From: Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: New USENET header: Language Message-ID: <1990Dec31.105011.4815@lth.se> Date: 31 Dec 90 10:50:11 GMT References: <1990Dec29.093002.10739@lth.se> <1990Dec30.205849.1120@faux> Sender: newsuser@lth.se (LTH network news server) Organization: Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden Lines: 33 In article <1990Dec30.205849.1120@faux> rfortier@faux.UUCP (Richard W. Fortier) writes: >In article <1990Dec29.093002.10739@lth.se> Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) writes: >>The only character set needed is ISO 10646. It covers nearly every character >>in the world. > >Forgive me if I miss the point of the original article; if I do it's because >I don't HAVE the original article. But I think Dan's point leads to an >obvious conclusion; that the new header field should declare the >CHARACTER set, not the language. This is much more general. > There is one very bad thing about having a character set or a language header: I am not going to support an nearly infinite set of conversion tables at my site to be able to read articles! There are also a nearly infinite set of possible names of character sets and languages. If will be impossible to keep all the tables up to date. I can see no way we can manage to have the tables available and consistent at every site in the world. A single character set that covers all characters will make the special headers unneeded. Only tables between that character set and the few local character sets at a site is needed at each site. There will be no confusion about which character set or language the name in a header means, as the character set will always be the same. Dan -- Dan Oscarsson Department of Computer Science Lund Institute of Technology e-mail: Dan@dna.lth.se Box 118 S-221 00 Lund, Sweden