Re: Followup on the ccharset idea

[Michael Edenfield <kutulu@kutulu.org>]

* Rimas Kudelis <rq@akl.lt> [031020 18:09]:
> > Ian wrote:
> > Well afair i would be limited the instant .se's utf8 domain names goes
> > online (thats soon or has already happend). It's kinda foolish to not
> > provide one extra list that allows you to set a default language in
> > server commands/channel/queries but still works with utf8 where needed.
> >
> > I assume i could patch it when i have the time, although i don't feel
> > like learning gtk just yet.
> >
> > IMHO it's a really small change since the change on when you use the
> > server window is there, i can't help it if i type /server
> > se3.arcnet.vapor.com faster than i find it i a damn window. (Which also
> > goes for all the other servers i connect to.)
> 
> hostnames with national symbols? not bad, but not now.. not yet..
> Hey, are they standartized in any way? and if yes, then how? I *HOPE* they
> will use UTF-8, and not ISO-8859-1-15, etc for servernames, right?
> In that case, X-chat just needs a patch, which will always try to resolve
> hostnames in UTF-8. And it's rather a bug if it doesn't do that now.

Yes, they are standardized.  As of March this year, IETF finalized their
proposals and put some RFC's on the standards track.

Verisign has been testing internationalized domain names (IDN) for about
2.5 years in a .com/.net IDN testbed.  Netscape 7.1 is, I beleive, the
only major application to support them.

See RFC's http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3490.txt, rfc3491.txt, rfc3492.txt.

But IDN support in XChat is a much different issue than changing the
default and/or current character set.  To that issue, I have two
contributions (if you consider them that!) to the discussion:

1) it's a major pain in the ass to change your character encoding in
Windows.  As near as I can tell, setting a LC_* set of environment
variables doesn't do anything... assuming you know, for example, that
UTF-8 is code page 65001.  I can't find anywhere in Windows to change
the default code page -- only how to change it per-document!  I would
love to be able to tell X-chat to default to CP65001 automatically.

2) If you code it, they will run it ....

--Mike

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