RFD: New Usenet newsgroup comp.software.internat

["Daniel R. Kegel" <dank@alumni.cco.caltech.edu>]

[forwarded from usenet:news.announce.newgroups.  This is a proposal to
 create a Usenet newsgroup to discuss software internationalization.
 I am proposing this group because I feel the topic has outgrown the
 existing mailing lists & is now of sufficient general intereste to also
 warrant a newsgroup. ]
Followup-To: news.groups

The vote for comp.software.non-latin.east-asian was very close.
I bet many people voted NO because it had a narrow charter and awkward name.

I propose instead the new group comp.software.internat.
CHARTER:
    The unmoderated Usenet newsgroup comp.software.internat will provide a 
    forum to discuss software that can handle 'international', i.e. 
    non-English, text.  The encouraged topics will include
    1) How to write, where to find, and how to use internationalized software
    2) What hardware/operating systems support internationalized software,
       (e.g. how do I do Asian word processing on MS-DOS/MacOS/MS-Windows-NT?
       What hardware/operating systems are available in other countries?
       What is DOS/V?  How do I read a font from BIOS?)
    3) How to work with international de jure and de facto standards for 
       representation of text, e.g. ASCII, JIS, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC, GB2312, 
       KSC5601, ISO2022, ISO10646, and Unicode, and why some standards are
       popular in some countries & not others.
    4) How to process text in various languages (e.g. how do you strip
       vowels from Hebrew to get the canonical spelling?  How does one
       sort Chinese?  What is a locale file?) 

DISCUSSION PERIOD: 12 Feb - 5 March 1994
Please comment on whether we need this new newsgroup by posting followup
messages to news.groups.
At the end of this period, if there is enough interest, a call for votes
will be sent to the same groups this RFD was sent to.

WHY WE NEED THIS GROUP:  There is a pressing need for modern software
to be able to handle multiple languages- the user community is now global-
and existing forums are not adequate:

ISO10646@jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu, an unmoderated mailing list for discussing
   multi-byte character sets; it suffers from being a mailing list rather 
   than a newsgroup.  Perhaps it could be gatewayed to the new group
   for the benefit of those without Usenet access.

bit.software.international, aka insoft-l@cis.vutbr.cz, a moderated mailing
   list with a very similar charter, but which is looking for a new
   moderator, and has a very long delay time.

comp.std.internat, an unmoderated newsgroup, discusses all manner of 
   standards, and doesn't have much trafic about internationalized software.

ietf-charsets@INNOSOFT.COM, an unmoderated mailing list for discussing how
   applications on the Internet should represent plain text.  It seems
   to have a very small, quiet readership prone to the occasional screaming
   fit :-)

RELATED RECENT PROPOALS:
comp.software.non-latin.east-asian recently failed its creation fote.
alt.software.oriental was recently proposed, but I feel there is
enough of a need for global software that we should try to create a
less exclusive group.

- Dan Kegel (dank@alumni.caltech.edu)