Date: Mon, 12 Sep 1994 14:15:37 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC(_at_)panda(_dot_)com>
On Mon, 12 Sep 1994 15:57:00 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> NetNews is different because any article posted to a major newsgroup will
> eventually reach most of the NetNews servers on the planet. Any dire
> consequences of sending "8-bit" articles over NetNews are thus discovered
> very quickly....and the software is fixed.
My experience is that netnews servers silently drop any messages
which do not conform to their expectations, with no indication of any
failure.
I believe Keith's contention (feel free to correct me if I misunderstood
you, Keith!) is that the NetNews servers which are deployed are all
8-bit clean. After all, the number of different NetNews server
implementations can be still be counted on the fingers of one hand.
I can well believe that there may be some clients out there (perhaps
these are the ones from Microsoft?) that don't handle 8-bit, but as
Keith mentioned, those ones would have their deficiency quickly noticed
and fixed, without actually causing articles to be dropped on the floor
or otherwise munged by the servers.
That being said, my main problem with the "just send 8-bit" argument is
that ties you to only one character set, and that's a bad thing....
- Ted