[JDEV] charsets (was: Protocol extension?)

[Anders Qvist]

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

> 
> > I think you misunderstood me. Replying to existing messages is easy:
> > the client should assume that you're answering in the same language as
> > the sender had in his message. However, every time you send a new
> > message, it's kind of dangerous to assume any language. I myself is a
> > typical example. I will probably write about half the messages in
> > swedish and half in english. This would mean that if the client used
> > the locale or some default value, it would be wrong about half the
> > time, and I would have to fiddle with some pesky "select language"
> > { drop down list | command line paramter } about half the time.
> > However, if the roster info contained the *user's* locale, my client
> > could guess on that and be right most of the time.
> > 
> > Come to think of it, this would help bots and the like too, in that
> > they could talk to people in their native language. It would
> > definitively be nice if the roster info included preferred language
> > and probably charset as well.
> 
> This sounds like a sensible suggestion. (However I still think that the
> language attribute should be included elsewhere as well in case people
> want to use it)

Looking att protocol examples from jabber.org:

<message language="swahili" encoding="ISO-whatever-1234">
  <to>mbwana</to>
  <say>barbarbar!</say>
</message>

... or something the like. This raises the interesting question about
the <to></to> field. Should it also be able to contain non-us-ascii
characters? That could cause some complications for clients, right? If
a Japanese person's name contains Kanji or Furigana characters, his
name would be something like* "ÃUåS". We probably want to enforce user
IDs in us ascii, though at least some roster info can be in any
encoding... except group names and such.

[snip]

* typical; my netscape on Linux actually displays Kanji correctly.
  Let's cat /bin/uname instead.

Anders "Quest" Qvist
NetGuide Scandinavia

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