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- Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:850 news.software.nn:1648
- Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.software.nn
- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!darwin.sura.net!ra!atkinson
- From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson)
- Subject: Re: 8-bit anything?
- Message-ID: <BzBBqp.CF@ra.nrl.navy.mil>
- Sender: usenet@ra.nrl.navy.mil
- Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC
- References: <24355@alice.att.com> <Bz4oDJ.87D@poel.juice.or.jp> <BzAxzJ.7np@sci.kun.nl>
- Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 18:08:48 GMT
- Lines: 34
-
- In article <BzAxzJ.7np@sci.kun.nl> lwj@cs.kun.nl (Luc Rooijakkers) writes:
-
- >The next nn version will use MIME header tagging to indicate the
- >character set used. It will actually refuse to post 8-bit characters
- >without such headers (they will be added automatically if you tell
- >nn what character set to use).
-
- Great.
-
- It would also be useful to mark the 7-bit characters as US-ASCII or
- ISO-646-N or whatever they really are. That way other news readers
- would have a good chance at using the right glyph for the variant
- characters. (Not that I'd endorse using ISO-646-* if ISO-8859-* were
- available on those systems, but there will be some 646-only terminals
- and such for a while yet. :-)
-
- >By the way, isn't it time to create a news.8bit group :-) This subject
- >has been cropping up in lots of newsgroups during the last few weeks.
-
- Discussion seems to have settled down in comp.std.internat and I
- don't see any particularly good reason to move it. If it should move,
- lets not use the term "8-bit" in the name since we're also trying to
- support ISO-10646 and other wide character sets. A name like
- alt.usenet.mime might not be bad since the consensus appears to be
- that some kind of MIME-derivative is the approach to adopt for USENET
- news.
-
- I should mention that some freely distributable software (called
- "metamail") that helps implement MIME support for email packages is
- available by anonymous ftp from thumper.bellcore.com -- I'm sure the
- Metamail package would be just as useful for newsreader software.
-
- Ran
- atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil
-