brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (12/22/90)
I propose a new USENET header item, namely "Language:" The default, for historical reasons, would be "Language: English" but other fields would be fine. And sorry to be so anglo-centric, but I suspect that the language names should be the English names for the languages, since it is consistent with the use of English header names. ie. Language: French not: "Language: Francais" or "Langue: Francais" The need for this grows clear in an international net. People will want to use more and more languages, and those who can't read them will want to conveniently skip such postings. And indeed, sometimes even not feed such postings. Bilingual postings, as are often found in can.general, (where a person posts in English and the followup, with included text, is in French) could have "Language: English, French" although that doesn't fly well with the current kill file mechanism. (It works fine with something like newsclip) I would encourage that we avoid cuteness like "Language: C" for source postings. We really need another header to distinguish between postings for human consumption and computer consumption. Besides, C programs still need a language header to mark the language of their variables and comments. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473