Nicknames and multi-language support

Jan Kuipers (jen@cal012034.student.utwente.nl)
Thu, 25 Sep 1997 02:15:09 +0200 (MET DST)

On 23-Sep-97 Gerrit Hiddink wrote:
>>
>> Following conf.def:
>>
>> <Signon> ::= SIGNON <UserNum> <UserInfo>
>> <UserInfo> ::= <NickName> <NetworkAddress> <RealName>
>> <NickName> ::= <NameString>
>> <NameString> ::= <NameChar>+
>> <NameChar> ::= 'a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z' | '@'
>>
>> Isn't this too restrictive for a nick at signon time?
>
> Well it's not only at signon time, it's for all <NickName> field
> throughout a session. But perhaps you're right, and more characters
> should be allowed.. do you have any suggestions as to what characters
> should _not_ be allowed?

Probably very little, only "non printable" (in particular the bell) should
be disallowed.

On the topic of wwcn and internationalization: support for more than one
charset would be of great interest for everybody who does not solely use
latin-1. This includes the use of greek and mathematical symbols, chinese
japanese, braille or even klingon.

At first i only thought about usage of iso or unicode for the non-conver-
sational part (such as a nickname and a realname) but this could even
extend to the actual conversation. Unfortunately i don't have a clue as how
feasable or desirable this would be. The main question seems to be if people
in the same context (channel) are going to use different charsets.

Jan.

http://www.unicode.org