HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: keld@login.dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen)
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Keywords: ISO8859-1 CP850 fidonet gateway
Organization: DKnet
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 22:04:04 GMT

glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams) writes:

>  In article <keld.724583811@login.dkuug.dk> keld@login.dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes:
>  >POSIX .2b is planned to include the Plan9/XOpen encoding of 10646.
>  >Here the UTF2 encoding will be normatively defined by ISO.

>I find it extremely doubtful that it "will be normatively defined."
>Especially, since UTF-1 is only an informative annex.  I would expect
>other UTF-* to also be informative, and not normative.

>Of course, a usage profile might wish to make it normative, but that would be
>outside the scope of 10646.

>Glenn Adams

The UTF-2 encoding is not planned to be normative in ISO 10646,
but in ISO 9945-2. 

Keld
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
From: peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 23:17:40 GMT

In article <1g6o85INN5s6@rodan.UU.NET> avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov) writes:
> The changes i made to enjoy Russian e-mail and news here in US:
> 	sendmail -- removed two c & ~0200

> Now show me a networking admin who refuses to do it and i'd advice
> you to fire him on the spot.

Fire him because he doesn't have the source to sendmail?

I suggest replacing that with:

	dyke out sendmail and install something real.

Sendmail was fine when mail was in a state of massive flux and research
into address mapping was something most mail types had to do. These days
all that extra flexibility in sendmail.cf is just noise.
-- 
%Peter da Silva/77487-5012 USA/+1 713 274 5180/Have you hugged your wolf today?
/L{lineto}def/C{curveto}def/F{0 562 moveto 180 576 324 648 396 736 C 432 736 L
482 670 518 634 612 612 C}def/G{setgray}def .75 G F 612 792 L 0 792 L fill 1 G
324 720 24 0 360 arc fill 0 G 3 setlinewidth F stroke showpage % "Peerless"
Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:830 news.admin.misc:724
From: leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Date: 14 Dec 92 05:58:13 GMT
Article-I.D.: qiclab.1992Dec14.055813.12974
Reply-To: Leonard.Erickson@f51.n105.z1.fidonet.org
Organization: SCN Research/Qic Laboratories of Tigard, Oregon.

peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:

>In article <1992Dec7.184546.11068@osf.org> dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) writes:
>> A significant and growing number of people are using 8859/1 already,

>Another problem is people using *IBM-PC* 8-bit characters, *in headers*.
>This is common, apparently, in Fido. There is a character in Houston who
>has been using the name "(R<e dieresis><centered dot>gan)@???.fidonet.org",
>using the PC encoding. I think that involves characters *outside* the G0
>and G1 sets, too.

And the folks in Fido who do this get sniped at regularly, because 
Fido is *not* a "IBM-PC" network! It is specificly stated in many places
that text in echoes is to be limited to 7-bit ASCII, with only CR and
LF as allowed control characters. 

You see, fido has such things as old TRS-80s (of several models) Apple IIs
and other "oddities" as members. And they complain when someone screws up
their screen!

Such things *happen* in Fido, but aren't encouraged. Drop a note to the
Gateway admin about the guy. (???@ofa123.fidonet.org) He'll rattle the
guys cage.

-- 
Leonard Erickson		      leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com
CIS: [70465,203]			 70465.203@compuserve.com
FIDO:   1:105/51	 Leonard.Erickson@f51.n105.z1.fidonet.org
(The CIS & Fido addresses are preferred)
From: huitema@mitsou.inria.fr (Christian Huitema)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc,comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: X.400 as SMTP replacement (Re: 8-bit news)
Keywords: ISO8859 ISO10646 8bit SMTP X.400 Internet
Date: 11 Dec 92 15:20:38 GMT
Followup-To: comp.std.internat
Distribution: inet
Organization: INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France

In article <1ga650EINNl1b@uni-erlangen.de>, unrza3@cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:
> ... X.400 isn't a finished complete standard at the moment.
> Several important aspects of the standard (routing, management of X.400,
> management using X.400, dial-up use, group communication (=news), ...) 
> are still under development, so don't settle down your opinion about the
> whole concept too early.
> 

That X.400 "isn't a finished complete standard" is at the same time false,
true, and shocking:

 * A number of regulatory instances, e.g. GOSIP and various regulators mandate
 the use of X.400, or more precisely the provision of X.400 interfaces by
 whoever provides a regulated mail service. They would certainly not do that
 if they thought that the standard is not complete...

 * Not only is X.400 complete. You can even get it in two different,
 incompatible, flavours: 1984 and 1988. It has thus been completed twice.

 * Indeed you are right. X.400 is not complete. It uses such a baroque
 addressing scheme and pays so little attention to implementation details that
 making it work requires undue efforts. And a "solution" based on X.500 is not
 likely to help much. X.500 does not work either, due to its brain damaged
 hierarchical organization...

What is really shocking is that it took 12 years between the start of the
initial study and the current state. Speak of efficiency in the
standardization process!

Christian Huitema
Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:888 news.admin.misc:814
From: rap@news (Ross Paterson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Date: 17 Dec 1992 12:31:06 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
Reply-To: rap@doc.ic.ac.uk
NNTP-Posting-Host: peaberry.doc.ic.ac.uk

From article <24426@alice.att.com|, by andrew@alice.att.com (Andrew Hume):
| [...]
| 	thirdly, the Plan 9 encoding is the same as the FSS-UTF
| encoding being considered for adoption by X/Open as the
| recommended encoding for 10646 text streams. (i believe it
| has been approved by the technical committee and is wending
| its way through some process inside X/Open.)

It's hard to imagine that FSS-UTF will be popular with users of those
alphabets (all originating in Asia, BTW) whose letters are going to
take up 3 bytes, while they take up 2 in UTF-1 and 7 bits or so in
existing standards.

Ross
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson)
Subject: Re: 8-bit news
Keywords: ISO8859 ISO10646 8bit
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 21:53:55 GMT


In article <BzBJIA.3AM@ra.nrl.navy.mil> atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson) writes:
>  The systems are mostly orphans.... 

In article <1992Dec16.170407.11754@coop.com> chrisg@coop.com (Chris Garrigues) writes:
>Is it or is it not a fair assumption that such systems will be leaf
>nodes?  

  Some are leaves.  Some are not.  There might be some in the de facto
backbone, but I know for a fact that several are branches.  

  Given that safe encodings (e.g. BASE64) exist and are standard in
MIME, we'd be foolish to ignore such encodings.  Now sites that know
that their neighbors can handle 8-bit need not use such encodings, but
sites that don't know about their neighbors or who know the neighbor
can't handle it could include conversion as part of the process of
sending articles in/out.

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil
Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:908 news.admin.misc:842
From: unrza3@cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Date: 18 Dec 1992 19:29:22 +0100
Organization: Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen
Reply-To: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de

rap@news (Ross Paterson) writes:

>From article <24426@alice.att.com|, by andrew@alice.att.com (Andrew Hume):
>| [...]
>| 	thirdly, the Plan 9 encoding is the same as the FSS-UTF
>| encoding being considered for adoption by X/Open as the
>| recommended encoding for 10646 text streams. (i believe it
>| has been approved by the technical committee and is wending
>| its way through some process inside X/Open.)

>It's hard to imagine that FSS-UTF will be popular with users of those
>alphabets (all originating in Asia, BTW) whose letters are going to
>take up 3 bytes, while they take up 2 in UTF-1 and 7 bits or so in
>existing standards.

It should also be noted, that at least one existing OS (Windows NT)
uses a 2 byte encoding both internally (e.g. in filenames in Fnodes
on the disc) as well as in text files. Text files always begin with
FEFF as a magic code for ISO 10646 textes. This code also indicates,
whether it is a littleendian file.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
----- Anyone participating in the use of MS-DOS, Heroin or Cocaine is -----
---- simply not getting the most out of life possible. (Brian Downing) ----
Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:894 news.admin.misc:819
From: glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Date: 17 Dec 1992 15:50:23 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu
Keywords: ISO8859-1 CP850 fidonet gateway

  In article <keld.724583811@login.dkuug.dk> keld@login.dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes:
  >POSIX .2b is planned to include the Plan9/XOpen encoding of 10646.
  >Here the UTF2 encoding will be normatively defined by ISO.

I find it extremely doubtful that it "will be normatively defined."
Especially, since UTF-1 is only an informative annex.  I would expect
other UTF-* to also be informative, and not normative.

Of course, a usage profile might wish to make it normative, but that would be
outside the scope of 10646.

Glenn Adams
From: dorsey@gofish.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Ed Dorsey)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A (Ref Manual for Ada PL)
Keywords: Ada
Date: 14 Dec 92 18:34:29 GMT

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A, a.k.a.
Reference Manual for the Ada Programming Language?  Hard-copy, soft-copy...
any kind of copy (tho' an ftp site is preferred).  

Thanks,

-Ed Dorsey
Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:884 news.admin.misc:808
From: andrew@alice.att.com (Andrew Hume)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Summary: sorry for any confusion
Keywords: ISO8859-1 CP850 fidonet gateway
Date: 17 Dec 92 05:01:51 GMT
Article-I.D.: alice.24424
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



	i appear to have confused randall a tad. the UTF-2 encoding
requires 8 bit transmission.
	i am puzzled why people want to do 8859-* as an intermediate step.
it seems clear to me that if you can get the damn bits through,
you may as well do UTF-2, particularly as there is a well-defined
invertible mapping between 10646 and all the 8859-* character sets.

			andrew hume
From: tml@tik.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Week Numbering
Date: 18 Dec 92 16:11:33
Organization: Technical Research Centre of Finland, Laboratory for Information
	Processing (VTT/TIK)
NNTP-Posting-Host: tiuhti.tik.vtt.fi
In-reply-to: torbenm@diku.dk's message of 18 Dec 92 10:56:32 GMT

In article <1992Dec18.105632.2494@odin.diku.dk> torbenm@diku.dk (Torben AEgidius Mogensen) writes:
   >Is there an international standard for numbering weeks.

Yes, there is an ISO standard. I don't recall the number. As far as I
know, week numbers aren't much used in the US, for instance. At least
in the Nordic countries it is very common to refer to week numbers, as
in "How about week 24 for the next meeting?".

It is interesting to note that ANSI C and POSIX strftime(3) uses the
wrong week numbering algorithm, at least according to its manual page
in HP-UX, which says:

           %W        week number of the year (the first Monday as the first
                     day of week 1) as a decimal number [00,53]

while the standard says that the week which contains the first
Thursday is week one. Week one could thus start in the previous year,
as it did this year, 1992. Week 1 began on Monday, 1991-12-30 (this is
the ISO standard (human-readable) date format, btw), and ended on
Sunday, 1992-01-05.
--
Tor Lillqvist,
working, but not speaking, for the Technical Research Centre of Finland,
Laboratory for Information Processing (VTT/TIK).
Xref: sparky comp.std.internat:871 news.admin.misc:786
From: unrza3@cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Date: 16 Dec 1992 14:57:55 +0100
Organization: Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen
Reply-To: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de
Keywords: ISO8859-1 CP850 fidonet gateway

kosta@blues.kk.sub.org (Kosta Kostis) writes:

>If one decides to use ISO 8859-1 as the common character set for news
>one has support for 44 countries in the world (according to the standard).
>Should you use ISO 8859-x, add even more countries. Most of them
>"indo-european". If you stay with US ASCII the number is much lower.

Most amusingly, US-ASCII does not even cover English.
E.g. look at rle in your dictionary. :-)

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
----- Anyone participating in the use of MS-DOS, Heroin or Cocaine is -----
---- simply not getting the most out of life possible. (Brian Downing) ----
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson)
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Keywords: ISO8859-1 CP850 fidonet gateway
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 20:45:53 GMT

In article <eaRsVB2w165w@blues.kk.sub.org> kosta@blues.kk.sub.org (Kosta Kostis) writes:

>If one decides to use ISO 8859-1 as the common character set for news
>one has support for 44 countries in the world (according to the standard).
>Should you use ISO 8859-x, add even more countries. Most of them
>"indo-european". If you stay with US ASCII the number is much lower.

>It would be all much nicer, if we had ISO 10646 - well at least for
>many of us.  :-)  But this will take much longer than adding support
>for ISO 8859-x. Using ISO 8859-x is a real nice migration path anyway.

  Shouldn't really take any longer if done correctly.  Certainly the
good folks at AT&T Bell Labs have shown that it works quite nicely.
The Bell Labs encoding for ISO-10646 appears to be the leading
contender for adoption by MIME as the conventional way to encode
ISO-10646 in MIME email -- and it would be just fine with either 7-bit
or 8-bit transport (if I understand Andrew Hume correctly).  Moreover,
the transported character set and the displayed character set need not
be the same.

  For example, one can transport text as ISO-10646 encoded into some
suitable 7-bit form even and then use ISO-8859-* fonts to display that
text and Japanese X0208 (etc.) fonts to display that text and can use
the public domain Vietnamese fonts (from sonygate.sony.com via
anonymous ftp) to display that text.

  I really really am opposed to ONLY handling the ISO-8859-* cases.
It is perfectly clear that we can handle the general problem quite
nicely now that ISO-10646 is almost done.  We should solve the general
problem.  Doing that will NOT necessarily take any more time.

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
From: brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Re: 8-bit news
Organization: ClariNet Communications Corp.
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 10:00:23 GMT

For things like rich text, non-ASCII characters, I agree that using
encodings that fit into ASCII is a good idea.

However, when it comes to graphics and other binary information in
multimedia news articles, I find this to be too much of a kludge in the
service of old software.

I say, let such articles break on machines with old software.

We're not running the same sort of net any more.  So many links are tcp/ip
now.  What this means is that:

	a) If you're a leaf, and you don't upgrade, you simply don't get
	multimedia articles.  Your choice.

	b) If you're a truly major node, one of the top 100 on Brian's
	graph, you had better have 8 bit clean news software.  But there
	are only a small number of you, so we can manage it.

	c) If you're a non-leaf, your downstreamers will complain to you
	if you can't handle articles they want.  But because so many
	links are on the internet and can be easily moved, what this means
	is that if you don't upgrade, people just switch to other sites for
	their feeds, and you become a leaf, or a site feeding leaves that
	don't care.

	d) If no hub in an entire town of uucp links upgrades, then you
	are stuck.  However, this is a much smaller case than it used to
	be.

Full speed ahead to binary clean news, and damn the torpedos.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson)
Subject: Re: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem
Keywords: ISO8859-1 CP850 fidonet gateway
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 14:37:18 GMT

In article <24424@alice.att.com> andrew@alice.att.com (Andrew Hume) writes:
>
>
>	i appear to have confused randall a tad. the UTF-2 encoding
>requires 8 bit transmission.

  Thanks.  That is OK.  If I have an enhanced SMTP, I can send 8-bits
that using enhanced SMTP way and so UTF-2 is fine.  If not, I can
encode UTF-2 using BASE64 into a 7-bit-safe transmission format and
send it over existing SMTP links while still being fully MIME
compliant either way.

>	i am puzzled why people want to do 8859-* as an intermediate step.
>it seems clear to me that if you can get the damn bits through,
>you may as well do UTF-2, particularly as there is a well-defined
>invertible mapping between 10646 and all the 8859-* character sets.

There are several explanations.  These are all pragmatic explanations,
not technical justifications:

1) There is a fairly decent sized installed base of ISO-8859-* terminals.
2) Many people don't understand that the transmission encoding and 
   the presentation encodings only need to be convertible and do not 
   necessarily have to be identical.
3) ISO-10646 was not finished when MIME finished and ISO-10646 had failed to
   be passed once already and it wasn't clear how long it would take for
   ISO to finish it.  Under IETF/IESG rules, an RFC can only cite existing
   works not "works in progress" such as a pending ISO standard that has
   not been approved.  There was desire not to have MIME publication be
   dependent on ISO getting their act together.  NB: When MIME progresses
   towards full-standard status, I fully expect ISO-10646 to be specifically
   cited and its use to be encouraged.

ASIDE:
   I wish Microsoft had thought about this as much as you all 
at Bell Labs did.  It would be better if everyone used UTF-2 (IMHO).

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Subject: Re: 8-bit news
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central
	<1992Dec13.100023.7056@clarinet.com> <id.6AUV.IAA@ferranti.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 05:03:29 GMT

PdS> == peter da silva <peter@ferranti.com>

 PdS> That's the problem. UUCP is 8-bit clean. It's TCP/IP that's most likely
 PdS> to trash articles.

That's not the problem.  TCP is 8-bit clean.  It's NNTP that's most likely
to trash articles.  :)
--
Christopher K. Davis      | ``Usenet seems to run much like the Kif (or,
<ckd@eff.org>   EFF #14   |   for the TV generation, Klingon) high command.
System Administrator, EFF |   Whoever takes action and can be heard wins.''
+1 617 864 0665  [CKD1]   |   --Peter da Silva <peter@ferranti.com>
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit news
Date: 16 Dec 92 00:58:09 GMT
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC

In article <1glp8dINN4sc@rodan.UU.NET> avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov) writes:

>Look, if you're not using anything but ASCII "just send 8 bits"
>works just fine. If you have an old software and want to get
>extended character set you can't do it anyway, right?

Nope.  If you only use ASCII, by definition (ANSI X3.4-1986), you are
never sending 8 bits.  Moreover, news uses a flooding algorithm rather
than anything resembling routing, so even a 6-bit or 7-bit site will
(eventually) receive an 8-bit message that might crash it.  In the case
of email, receiving the wrong 8-bit character on the wrong machine is
_known_ to crash it.

>If the vendor-software crashes on, say, a file with 1025-byte line
>it's a bug, isn't it? If a program craches on ANYTHING it's a bug.
>A bug is a bug is a bug. Call their tech support and have them to
>fix it.

  In many cases the vendor doesn't exist and source code isn't
available and so it _cannot_ be fixed.  Also recall that USENET is
transported over weird links, not just UUCP and NNTP.

>"Just send 8 bits" *is* backward compatible. Check your logic.

Nope.  With email will crash other folks' machines, which is at least
highly anti-social and possibly down right malicious.  With news that
same thing might happen.

>Then why on the Earth did you upgrade your software the last time?

Many of the hosts in question _haven't_ upgraded their software in
years because they cannot upgrade their software -- which is why there
is _still_ a hosts.txt at nic.ddn.mil.

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: 8-bit news
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 02:35:22 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1gdin0INN2rm@agate.berkeley.edu> jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes:
>For any news article that has 8-bit characters in it, include a special
>header indicating the fact.  This header itself will contain eight-bit
>characters, and will be structured in such a way that it is very likely
>to be trashed by a 7-bit link, but that a recognizable residue will
>come through...

Please read RFC-1341, aka MIME.

It defines ways to express the presence of 8-bit characters, and also to
define *which* 8-bit character set you are using (you thought there was
only one, maybe, or that we could all agree on just one?).

It also defines ways to encode such characters so they can be transmitted
through 7-bit links, arriving *intact* rather than trashed.

While 8-bit-clean transmission paths are nice, there is no need to wait
for them or rely on them.  Which is just as well, since it will be many
years before Usenet as a whole will be 8-bit clean, NO MATTER WHAT WE DO.
We can start using 8-bit character sets (note plural) now, and have our
readers show us what was really meant -- or the closest approximation
our terminals can display -- without waiting for 8-bit links, or 8-bit
terminals, or universal agreement on a single 8-bit character set.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,news.admin.misc