Subj : UTF-8 nodelist report
To   : Sergey Dorofeev
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Mon Mar 10 2025 12:16:07

Hello Sergey,

On Monday March 10 2025 03:07, you wrote to me:

 SD> About question mark, is it valid symbol for sysop name? Can somebody
 SD> name himself as "???? ???? ????" for example?

Onde Fidonet sysop can ask more question than 10 FTSC members can answer. So I pass.

 MV>> Very bad idea. Having more than one encoding within the same file
 MV>> is a bad idea anyway, not just for the nodelist but for ANY text
 MV>> file.

 SD> Agree, thought it is technically possible, but it will kill 99%
 SD> programmers.

There is no generally agreed mechanism to change the encoding in the middle of a text file. Is say: don't even try it.

 MV>> Are you serious? You really still want every back alley in
 MV>> Fidonet to have its own 8 bit encoding? With all the forward and
 MV>> backward re-encoding and other limitations? C'mon.. That's chaos!
 MV>> Unicode was invented for the very purpose of getting rid of all
 MV>> this codepage shit.

 SD> That's the thing that I do to keep all messages on my node in UTF-8...
 SD> without stable success though.

OK. he message base however is something different. The best may be to archive them "as is". Or not, I don't know. But now we are no discussing the nodelist.

 MV>> Why do you think Microsoft went full Unicode internally? Three
 MV>> decades ago. Why do you think 99% of what is on the web is UTF-8?
 MV>> To get rid of the mess of all the hundreds of 8 bit encodings
 MV>> that floated around!

 SD> There was two ways... make encoding a part of type, as if you use int
 SD> for range, how to know, is it in miles or kilometers... or set the one
 SD> and only encoding. Second way was chosen.

So let us stick to that choice.

 MV>> Nah, as far as the nodelist goes, it is either just ASCII or
 MV>> UTF-8. No more codepage shit.

 SD> May be it is duty of ZC, to drop invalid segment, and not "help" sysop
 SD> to publish errors, replacing them with any mark.

I say it is the resposibiliy of the RCs to submit an error free segment to the ZC. But let's not make a mauntain out of a mole hil. We have ONE RC submitting a segment that causes ONE line in the nodlist to be in error. An error that is largely cosmetic.


Cheers, Michiel

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