On Sun, 16 Feb 2003, Dan Kohn wrote: > I believe actual use of Usenet diverged from RFC 1036 because the latter > didn't support internationalized (i18n) headers or i18n newsgroup names. > As a result, most international users started sending a hodgepodge of > different, unlabeled charsets, which works within communities but scales > horribly for Internet-wide use.
Good statement of the problem. > The obvious solutions are to either get > everyone to switch to UTF-8 or to get everyone to switch to > 2047/punycode. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches. But if > there are other issues that I'm not aware of, please enlighten me. The big minus with "get everyone to switch to UTF-8" is that it creates interoperability problems with an installed base. For this reason, it isn't going to happen. RFC 2047 is a deployed and interoperable solution. This is a no-brainer. So the only real question is whether punycode or some other mechanism is preferable for group names. The obvious alternative to punycode is UTF-7. I don't think that anyone wants to see any new use for UTF-7. Given that raw UTF-8 has fatal interoperability problems, and UTF-7 sucks; the only viable choice currently on the table is punycode. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
