[gopher] Re: Gopherness

[Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > There's utf8. But, when dealing with english texts, keeping them to
> > ASCII is, IMO, the best choice (unless it's some sort of scientific
> > text where using the greek letters themselves instead of using their
> > names is more readable (and it is not possible to use ASCII characters
> > instead)).
> 
> I'd actually love to see UTF-8 implemented in Gopher; has this been
> done before? ASCII may have been the standard back when the original
> spec was written, but it seems quite limiting to me now that there's
> been such a large effort toward standardized internationalization
> online, and that most modern OS's are compiled with UTF-8 support from
> the start. I know UTF is backwards-compatible with ASCII, so a
> transition wouldn't be too difficult, would it? Are there actual
> benefits to keeping things strictly ASCII?

I can see where it might be troublesome for filenames and selectors to be
UTF-8, although that would be a local filesystem and/or server issue.

However, there's nothing really preventing the use of UTF-8 in Gopher,
and in fact I am personally aware of several sites that use it. Overbite
does support it and the most current version has a bug with encoding smoked
out which should make it nearly perfect. I was testing it on both a Big5
encoded Chinese gopher site and another UTF-8 encoded menu, and it renders
correctly.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
-- You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. -- C.S. Lewis -----