From: gopher-bounce@complete.org
       Date: Sun Aug 10 23:06:55 2008
       Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopherness
       
       So gopher as it stands needs internationalization?
       I'm having trouble following a lot of these emails
       but i'm trying =3D-)
       
       Matt
       
       On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 3:34 PM, Nuno J. Silva <nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt> wrot=
       e:
       > JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@yahoo.com>
       > writes:
       >
       >> --- On Mon, 8/4/08, Nuno J. Silva
       >> <nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt> wrote:
       >>>
       >>> "Jay Nemrow" <jnemrow@quix.us> writes:
       >>>
       >>>> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Kyevan
       >>>> <kyevan@sinedev.org> wrote:
       >>>>
       >>>>> What about older clients, though? Modern clients will probably
       >>>>> handle UTF-8 at least well enough to not explode, but older clients
       >>>>> might not.  Generally, it seems safest to stick to the subset that
       >>>>> is ASCII when reasonable, only using UTF-8 or such when it's
       >>>>> actually needed. ... is a perfectly readable replacement for
       >>>>> U+2026, even if it's not "typographically correct." On the other
       >>>>> hand, if you're trying to post a text in, say, a mix of Arabic, and
       >>>>> Klingon, go right ahead and use UTF-8.
       >>>
       >>> There are also these iso* charsets which just use 8 bit to encode the
       >>> text, not allowing a greater collection of characters, and using
       >>> those you wouldn't be able to mix charsets.
       > <snip/>
       >>> On the other hand, even if the choice was utf8 (so the documents would
       >>> be ASCII or utf8), I'd keep iso* support, just in case (therefore my
       >>> question is 'should we use the same sort of character encoding when
       >>> publishing non-english documents? if yes, which one?' and not 'what
       >>> should a client support?').
       >>>
       >>> What's the actual scenario? Is there any client which crashes due to
       >>> utf8? Which clients are not able to render it correctly? And what
       >>> about iso* charsets support?
       >>
       >> How would we print a Gopher retreived text document on, for example,
       >> an older (or mini-mainframe) computer which only uses a Daisy Wheel
       >> Printer or Teletype Printer (which ONLY supports ASCII characters)?
       >
       > If the documents (in any of the mentioned encodings) have non-ASCII
       > characters, the behaviour is undefined (e.g., if the machine ignores the
       > 8th bit, another characters will be rendered instead of the desired ones)=
       .
       >
       > But there's nothing we can do about that, except writing some script to
       > replace the existing non-ASCII characters with some ASCII description.
       >
       > Avoiding the use of non-ASCII characters is, of course, a good
       > idea. But, if there's some document in a non-western language, or a
       > language which requires another alphabet, it's impossible to use ASCII
       > in that situation.
       >
       > <snip/>
       >
       > --
       > Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
       > LEIC student at Instituto Superior T=E9cnico
       > Lisbon, Portugal
       > Homepage: http://njsg.no.sapo.pt/
       > Gopherspace: gopher://sdf-eu.org/11/users/njsg
       > Registered Linux User #402207 - http://counter.li.org
       >
       > -=3D-=3D-
       > Ooh, mommy, mommy, what I have now doesn't work in this extremely
       > unlikely circumstance, so I'll just throw it away and write something
       > completely new.
       >        -- Linus Torvalds
       >
       >
       >
       >