I would recommend that everyone interested in dealing with extensions
to News get and read Henry Spencer's "son-of-RFC-1036" draft.
You can find the reference through http://domen.uninett.no/~hta/ietf/news.html
(if I remembered the reference correctly).
I think it is a FTP reference to zoo.toronto.edu, but not being online
at the moment, I can't check it.
He discusses several items rather carefully, in particular, section 4.4
discusses the issue of character sets in News in some details.
His recommendation is:
"Cooperating subnets which wish to employ non-ASCII character sets by
using escape sequences (emplying e.g., ESC (ASCII 27), SO (ASCII 14),
and SI (ASCII 15)) to alter the meaning of superficially-ASCII character
MAY do so, but MUST use MIME headers to alert reading agents to the
particular character set(s) and escape sequences in use.
.......
NOTE: Cooperating-subnet organizers are warned that some very old relayers
strip certain control characters out of articles they pass along. ESC
is known to be among the affected characters.
.......
Articles MUST not contain any octet with value exceeding 127, i.e. any
octet that is not an ASCII character.
NOTE: This rule, like others, may be relaxed by unanimous consent of
the members of a cooperating subnet, provided suitable precautions
are taken to ensure that rule-violating articles do not leak out
of the subnet. (This has already been done in many areas where
ASCII is not adequate for the local language(s))
......
.....If it comes to a relayer's attention that it is being asked to pass
an article using such techniques [as non-ASCII or escape sequences] outward
across what it knows to be the boundary of such a cooperating subnet,
it MUST report this error to its administrator, and MAY refuse to pass
the article beyond the subnet boundary. If it does pass the article, it
MUS re-encode it with MIME encodings to make it conform to this Draft"
I have CCed him on this extensive quote, so that he knows he is being
quoted in a discussion on use of extended character sets in News, even
if it is not on a News-related list.
Harald T. Alvestrand