UTF-8 (Was: More charset things)

[Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no>]

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no>:

>>>>> François Pinard <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>:
>> That is why Lars could well decide, one of these days, to support
>> UTF-8 as an encoding (which it really is) on the same level as
>> Base64, and moreover, rather fun to implement.  It might be
>> convenient that Gnus do so as a contribution to the Unicode effort,
>> without really waiting for Emacs to do it.

One reason to support UTF-8 decoding and encoding, is that
son-of-son-of-1036 (or watchamacallit) 
	http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-article-01.txt
seems to recommend UTF-8 for both the headers and bodies of news
messages. 

Hm... the way this works would probably be to have a UTF-8 decoding
that would always attempt to decode a news message and then revert to
a locale or newsgroup specific setting if the UTF-8 decoding breaks
down (use of the iso-8859-1 charset in the case of the no.*
hierarchy).

UTF-8 encoding should probably not be made default for a while yet.
At least it should be made newsgroup hierarchy dependent.

> But isn't UTF-8 support something that really should be done at the C
> level (like base64 is done in newer emacsen)?  Or am I thinking of
> UTF-7 here...? (does anyone have some handy online references?)

UTF-8 is defined in RFC2279
	ftp://ftp.ntnu.no/pub/rfc/rfc2279.txt

UTF-7 is defined in RFC2152
	ftp://ftp.ntnu.no/pub/rfc/rfc2152.txt

Both would probably be best off with decoding done in C.