[JDEV] charsets (was: Protocol extension?)

[Lindsay.Marshall at newcastle.ac.uk]

> As to the argument about keeping client restrictions to a minimum, as
> a swede, I'd say a program such as a jabber client is not working if I
> cant use national swedish characters (mainly åäö) when communicating
> with other swedes. 

This is absolutely correct. Jabber will simply not be used if it cannot
deal with natioanl character sets. That is not say that every client has
to be able to handle every charcaterset - but certainly the dominsatn
character set of a user's country should be supported.

> Anyway, you dont need to force the clients to understand charsets, but
> the jaber message format must be able to convey which character set
> the message is written in. Personally, I'd prefer if ALL messages were
> marked with character set, even if it is "the default one".

Can I also suggest that there is a marking for language as well. I
think that it is quite important to provide as much information as
possbile. If you provide a language tag then I can interface my client
to an automatic translation system and get messages translated without
having either to tell the system the language by hand or else trying to
guess the language (which is hard). There are well defined tags for
languages that can just be picked up. I think that language and encoding
are essential additions to the coding.

> Sorry to jump on you like this. Most European countries have some
> national characters not enclosed in us-ascii and it is frustrating
> having those issues continually marginalised by US developers. I can
> only imagine how the Japanese feel about it.

Oh, the Japanese really, really hate it and so do the Russians and the
Chinese, and the Koreans, actually *everybody* hates it apart from the
people in the USA...

L.
-- 
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Lindsay