[Usefor folks: Apologies for sending this twice, but the first attempt
didn't make it to ietf-822, as I am not a subscriber there.]
"Dan Kohn" <dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com> writes:
By contrast, if i18n of news were accomplished with 2047/2231 encoding
(plus punycode for newsgroup names), all existing gateways (including
those used by moderators!) would keep working as usual,
Yes, it would, but there is even simpler path to achieve the same
effect: do nothing.
Punycode is useless, because it is not compatible with anything. Sure,
nothing breaks, but a newsgroup name must be display well and a name
in Punycode gets wrecked beyond recognition, even for Latin scripts.
Unless, of course, you have a reader that understands Punycode, but
there is no such thing today. So it is not very likely that any
hierarchy would actually use it.
UTF-8 names does of course look garbled in a reader that does not under-
stand UTF-8, but for languages using Latin scripts, the name is fairly
likely to be comprehensible. For other scripts, though, the UTF-8 name
is completely opaque.
Furthermore, there are newsreaders today that understands UTF-8. I can
read UTF-8 from trn through my SSH client. Not because trn knows UTF-8,
but because my SSH client does.
And that's an important thing that the mail people have difficulties to
understand: UTF-8 is a much more widespread encoding that is used far
beyond the realm of news and mail, whereas RFC2047 or Punycode is not.
We are not looking for a token solution that provides internationalization
in theory, but once that can be used in reality.
--
Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar(_at_)algonet(_dot_)se