[gopher] CAPS capability: ServerDefaultCharset

[Mateusz Viste]

On 01/03/2015 12:39 PM, Nuno Silva wrote:
> Improperly rendered UTF-8 will easily become unreadable[1], which is my
> main problem when mixing encodings. By "unreadable" I mean that you
> can't get the meaning of the text.

Yes, but again, I had in mind people that *already* use utf-8 in the 
gopherspace, not mass conversion of existing stuff. In this situation, 
such CAPS setting can only help, and do no harm (worst case scenario: 
the gopher client ignores CAPS, and renders the content like it does 
currently).

> Several languages require characters that are not part of ASCII,
> including Finnish, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

And Polish, and many other. But these are "soft" problems, you got at 
least latin characters right, so lecture is possible. But try to read 
any cyrillic-based language (Ukrainian, Russian, Bulgarian...) - there, 
*every* character is scrambled.

> Are there any gopher clients that try to autodetect whether the text is
> utf8 or ISO-8859?

None that I know about.

> (IF that's even possible without false positives - I guess it's easier with ISO-8859-1...)

On the contrary, it's much easier to identify UTF-8, since it uses 
clearly defined bit patterns. Detecting any 8-bit charset is a mess, as 
it requires statistical analysis of the content.

Mateusz