Subj : The seven-bit restriction
To   : Bj”rn Felten
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Fri Jul 27 2018 01:25:02

Hello Bj”rn,

On Monday February 03 2014 16:45, you wrote to All:

 BF> Just out of curiosity: why in Heavens Name are you keeping the
 BF> seven-bit restriction in the program?

It doesn't. For some time now - on my suggestion - it supports this option:

Allow8bit 1

 BF>    Check out the listing of 2:203/6 to see what little progress we
 BF> have made for soon to be 15 years. I've had that listing, properly
 BF> spelled, for many years now, and I'm still just Bj?rn in the nodelist
 BF> there... :(

There is just one little problem. Just as the ASCII only restriction is not 
fair to the world outside the part where the native US English speakers live, 
it would not be fair to restrict it to those that can spell their name or city 
properly in CP437, CP850 or LATIN-1.

I we allow more than ASCII, we should allow ALL Fidonet participants to have 
their name properly spelled. Unfortunately there is no single 8 bit character 
set that can fulfil this requirement, and having a different character encoding 
scheme for each line is ehh.. unpractical.

The only thing that makes sense is to use UTF-8. That means the ” in you name 
will be encoded by two bytes in the nodelist.

When I see TWO questions marks in the nodelist for 2:203/6, we can discuss this 
again.


Cheers, Michiel

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