Xref: utzoo news.software.b:6509 alt.bbs:3871 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!dkuug!dkuugin!keld From: keld@login.dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) Newsgroups: news.software.b,alt.bbs Subject: Re: New USENET header: Language Message-ID: Date: 1 Jan 91 19:56:27 GMT References: Sender: news@slyrf.dkuug.dk Followup-To: news.software.b Lines: 34 My two cents worth on the Language: header: There is an ISO standard ISO 639:1988 which contains all the languages in the world with their English, French and native names - and a standard two-letter abbrevation. I will suggest that the abbrevation should be used in this proposed header. An exert of the ISO 639 standard is available by anon ftp in dkuug.dk:i18n/ISO_639 - it has all abbrevations and the English name listed, but no French nor native names. Concerning the character set, there was a discussion on the news early last year (1990!) - where Kim Storm (the author of nn) announced that support for extended character sets was planned for nn. I think he is still planning this, but the implementation is becoming nearer. Kim Storm planned on using some software I have developed. This SW can handle (in the current release) some 60 different character sets and represent in each character set all of the others via some quite mnemonic encoding. Thus you can have presented what your equipment is capable of, and the rest can be deciphered too, without loss of information. You can use an encoded ASCII as the transport character set, this should pass any news agent in the world. I am employing this SW at dkuug.dk - the Danish Internet mail backbone and uucp gateway, via a sendmail 5.64 + IDA implementation. I there have implemented the headers X-Charset: and X-Char-Esc: to specify the encoding. I am also working together with Dan Oscarsson on doing a truly ISO 10646 based sendmail. The Sendmail and character set SW is available from dkuug.dk:pub Keld Simonsen