[JDEV] charsets (was: Protocol extension?)

[Anders Qvist]

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999 Lindsay.Marshall at newcastle.ac.uk wrote:

[snip]
> > 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.

How do the client know the language of a message? "Normal" human usage
patterns would probably be to write most mesasges in their native
language and some in english. It seems to me that selecting language
on every other message will likely be too much of a hassle. Of course, it
would be possible for every user to enter preferred language in your
profile in the roster. Intelligent clients could guess that yuo write a
message to a person in his/her preferred language. That would reduce
the number of occasions of manual language selection, if not eliminate
it.

... or we could pipe the text through spell with varying dictionaries
and select the one that has least errors. ;)

All this is a client issue of course, and shouldn't bother the
protocol/DTD itself. Misuse is no reason not to do things right. Still
it will be an issue. Any suggestions?

Anders "Quest" Qvist
NetGuide Scandinavia

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