Re: Info on Internationalization

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Shenghuo ZHU <zsh@cs.rochester.edu> writes:

> External program read and write text in emacs-mule coding system. But
> XEmacs does not support emacs-mule.

What is the emacs-mule coding system, anyway?  Is it just an, er,
binary dump of the internal Emacs MULE representation or something?

> I am thinking about native elisp implementation. However, the
> convert table is a bit large.

Hm.  Well, if there is some program that translates utf-8 to MULE,
then why doesn't Emacs include that code in Emacs proper?

I am on the xemacs-mule@xemacs.org mailing list, which isn't very
active, but has made many things about the XEmacs implementation
clearer to me.  Is there a mailing list used by the Emacs MULE people?

> How about using gnus-default-language or checking the charset the
> message uses? 

Well -- I'm a pretty typical European mail user, I think.  I get mail
in my native language and in English.  What language I respond in
depends mainly on what language people address me in.  The character
set I use for 99.3% of all my messages is iso-8859-1, no matter what
language I respond in.  (Although the English messages often are in
ASCII, but so are some of the more terse Norwegian ones.)

So, for me, I'd have to default to language "en", and correct that
manually to "no" whenever I write Norwegian text.

I see no real tangible benifits to this.  As with the January 1st 1999 
"deadline" for utf-8 support, I think the Content-Language thing is
premature.  Voice-speech mail readers (!) are still rare.  The
Content-Language header can wait until the computer is smart enough to 
figure out (through artificial stupidity) which language I'm typing,
and by that time, the receiver can do the same, which makes the whole
thing moot.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen