Thanks for all your replies - be warned that you're all now in my list of potentially helpful people ;)
I like to ask for feature-requests as early as possible so that I can sketch out what I've got to write. I'm well versed in the pain caused both by over-reaching (great results short-term, unmanageable code long-term) and under-reaching (6 months into a project, a new feature request might mean a complete rewrite - I'm doing this project in part because I didn't see Unicode coming until it was too late). My strategy to deal with this kind of thing is to get all the suggestions in quickly so that I can keep them in mind, but stick to a slow and steady progression of code. On some specific points - http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=1429&t=1429 claims that MSN paging may only be supposed to work with the official MSN client. I'm not that fond of MS, but surely if that's the way they want to fund their network, we shouldn't lightly step on that, just because we can? Also, on the subject of charsets - that whole area confuses me - UTF-8 can encode any character in any of the character sets mentioned on hypothetic.org. In particular, I know that Unicode was designed in part to improve upon the mistakes of SHIFT-JIS. I can only think that this information is redundant (a hint to the GUI) or that the protocol authors shoved "charset=UTF-8" into the header for decoration. Either of these would be a change from the surprisingly open, simple protocol to the twisted, non-conformant MS I've heard so much about :) Do you have any multilingual text which I could examine? - Andrew
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