CYRILLIC IN GOPHER

As we have no way to specify encoding of text files in gopher,
and most clients do not support UTF-8 in menus (and treat any
8-bit encoding as ISO-8859-1), I propose the
following standards:

1) Only UTF-8 and KOI8 should be accepted as valid cyrillic
encodings in Gopherspace. Legacy 8-bit cyrillic text should be
interpreted as KOI8, while 2-byte encoded text should be UTF-8
and the latter should be preferred.

2) However, client may request document in specified charset,
if server supports that. E.g. server can convert encodings on
the fly based on some query string parameter like "?koi8-r".
Such documents should be presented as different links in gopher
menu. Client cannot and should not guess if server can do any
encoding conversions.
[NOTE: however, we should test if gopher+ clients can do that]

3) We should avoid non-ascii in gopher menus, so only letters
A a B C c E e H (I i) K k M (m) (n) O o P p T (u) X x (Y) y 
must be used for cyrillic wherever possible, otherwise translit 
should be used. Too many clients now do not understand non-ASCII
in menus. However, we should start working on improving clients
to allow using UTF-8 in menus. Support for legacy 8-bit
encodings is not really needed.


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