From: gopher-bounce@complete.org
       Date: Mon Aug  4 06:33:16 2008
       Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopherness
       
       > > There's utf8. But, when dealing with english texts, keeping them to
       > > ASCII is, IMO, the best choice (unless it's some sort of scientific
       > > text where using the greek letters themselves instead of using their
       > > names is more readable (and it is not possible to use ASCII characters
       > > instead)).
       > 
       > I'd actually love to see UTF-8 implemented in Gopher; has this been
       > done before? ASCII may have been the standard back when the original
       > spec was written, but it seems quite limiting to me now that there's
       > been such a large effort toward standardized internationalization
       > online, and that most modern OS's are compiled with UTF-8 support from
       > the start. I know UTF is backwards-compatible with ASCII, so a
       > transition wouldn't be too difficult, would it? Are there actual
       > benefits to keeping things strictly ASCII?
       
       I can see where it might be troublesome for filenames and selectors to be
       UTF-8, although that would be a local filesystem and/or server issue.
       
       However, there's nothing really preventing the use of UTF-8 in Gopher,
       and in fact I am personally aware of several sites that use it. Overbite
       does support it and the most current version has a bug with encoding smoked
       out which should make it nearly perfect. I was testing it on both a Big5
       encoded Chinese gopher site and another UTF-8 encoded menu, and it renders
       correctly.
       
       -- 
       ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
         Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@floodgap.com
       -- You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. -- C.S. Lewis -----