A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Martin v. Löwis]

Alan Kennedy <alanmk at hotmail.com> writes:

> I personally don't have the slightest problem with reformulating NNTP
> and POP to use XML instead: In a way, I think it's almost inevitable,
> given how poor our existing "ascii" technologies are at dealing with
> i18n and l10n issues. Emails and usenet posts are all just documents
> after all.
> 
> Would something like this really be so offensive (the Gaelic isn't, I
> promise :-)? Or inefficient?

It would be pointless doing so. All the infrastructure needed to
communicate different encodings in NNTP is already there - no need to
change any protocol at all. The specification part has already been
done. It is called MIME.

What is lacking is the implementations. Just saying "Use XML then"
won't magically make implementations appear.

Regards,
Martin