Charset for newsgroups file

[Christoph Biedl]

Felix E. Klee wrote...

> On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 09:43:37 -0800 Russ Allbery wrote:
> > > Anyone: Is an extension planned that solves this problem?
> > 
> > The solution is to mandate UTF-8 encoding and make all news readers
> > understand that.
> 
> A bad idea,

The best idea. Although the transition is indeed a big problem.

> IMHO: Currently most news readers seems to assume Latin-1
> encoding and people will continue using current readers for years to
> come.

And will never change unless there's the pressure to do so. By the way,
it seems to me that OSes are actually moving towards Unicode .

> A simple solution to the problem would be mandating that the
> encoding is specified on a line in the newsgroups file (e.g. "\encoding:
> UTF-8").  Another solution would be introducing an NNTP command that
> returns the encoding.  And so on ...

Instead of another re-invention of the wheel: There is already that
inline encoding for RfC-822 headers, the =?iso-8859-1?q?...?= stuff.
Never again such annoying *censored*, please.

    Christoph