Subj : Re: oh those russians
To   : Maurice Kinal
From : Konstantin Kuzov
Date : Tue Feb 28 2017 16:03:42

Greetings, Maurice!

KK>> especially in fidonet where dominating codepage is CP866
MK> Which completely ignores most Russian users which are more than likely
MK> using CP1251.

Using CP1251 exactly where? And why don't KOI8-R? Or even ISO-8859-5?

MK> The above quote assumes that Russian sysops are content keeping fidonet
MK> within a small group of users of Russian abandonware rather than open
MK> it up to the larger group of actual Russian users.

Until that majority of users switch to modern software which supports unicode it isn't possible to switch to UTF-8. How you want to convince them for necessity of such move?
Using CP1251 or KOI8-R can also cause issues if receiver doesn't setup xlat tables right. And there are no benefits using other 8bit encoding instead of CP866 in any case.

MK> Also, like everywhere else in the world, utf-8 is the majority of
MK> systems on the internet which will likely spread to the majority of
MK> users ... eventually.  One could easily argue that universal adoption of
MK> utf-8 text messaging only makes economic sense since the exact same
MK> capable device could be used anywhere by anyone no matter what their
MK> native language(s) happen to be.

No one argues that UTF-8 is better over 8bit encodings. But in fidonet there are currently many technical stoppers exits whose blocking usage of it.

MK> By the way, this tagline is 8 bit Russian except NOT CP866 but instead
MK> CP1251 which is the most likely to happen in real usuage, and as a
MK> matter of fact I have witnessed it happen on a Russian website in the
MK> past.  It should say the same as the 8 bit Greek (CP737) tagline except
MK> in Russian.

Which turned to garbage because of bogus CHRS kludge. But you don't care isn't it?

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