Text 4922, 53 rader
Skriven 2011-11-25 12:18:25 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
   Kommentar till text 4909 av Björn Felten (2:203/2)
Ärende: Character kludges
=========================
Hello Björn,

On Friday November 25 2011 02:19, you wrote to Ross Cassell:

 BF>    The present kludge based character conversion is not working
 BF> properly.

It works reasonably well if one confines oneself to one language. The main and
presently most annoying limitation is that one can not use characters from the
LATIN-x character sets together with Cyrillic characters in the same message.

 BF> Having a new pkt-standard based on 16-bit would make away with all
 BF> CHAR-kludge ideas.

We do not need a new pkt standard to solve the character set issues. Except for
that silly soft return (hex 8D) all present day fidonet software is fully 8 bit
transparent and so UTF-8 encoding will do the trick. All we have to do is
declare UTF-8 the default character encoding standard for FidoNet. UTF-8 has
the advantage that is is fully downward compatible with good old ASCII. Those
that do not need more than the old 7 bit ASCII character set can go on as
before and everything will keep working for them. Those who want the full
richness of the Universal Character Set can switch to UTF-8 compatible readers
and editors and leave the lower layers intact.

We could even allow non ASCII characters in the nodelist that way and finally
get some people's names right. ;-)

 BF> Plus pkt3 could move a lot of the now common kludges into the
 BF> pkt-header.

I think that is bridge too far. It is much too late in the game for a
completely new - not downward compatible - standard.

 BF> After all, all our kludges are just a way to overcome the limitations
 BF> of present standards.

True, and from a purely technical POV, a complete redo from scratch, would be
the best thing. But we have to be realistic and the reality is that anything
not downward compatible with current practise, will kill FidoNet. We simply do
not have the manpower and the drive any more to invoke drastic changes. Only
young trees can be replanted. The forest of FidoNet is full of old trees.

 BF>    We might even find a way to put pictures into our messages -- but I
 BF> guess that's a wee bit too far into the future...

The simplest and most effictive way is to just give a link:
http://www.vlist.eu/brandy.jpg


Cheers, Michiel

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