On Thursday, December 4, 2003, 23:37:09, Fredrik Tolf wrote:

6. Shouldn't users be able to switch charsets? For example, chats in
   Japanese (or other East Asian languages) would benefit much more
   from EUC-JP or UTF-16 than from UTF-8. Chats in Cyrillic would also
   benefit from eg. KOI8. Of course, UTF-8 would be the standard. If a
   message cannot be encoded with the selected charset, the hub could
   replace invalid characters with eg. question marks to indicate that
   the user should switch charset to be able to recieve messages
   correctly. Another possibility is to only allow switching between
   different UTF-x charsets, so that all characters still can be
   encoded, only with different levels of bandwidth wastage. A third
   possibility is to be able to MIME encode messages to temporarily
   switch charsets, like =?UTF-8?Q?=E3=81=82?= to include a Japanese
   "?" even though the user's current charset is KOI8.

Won't adding different charset support just overbloat the client? Just
supporting utf8 would cover all languages, even if it would make the chat a
bit bigger - but I believe that everybody agrees that chat is far from being
bandwidth demanding. Is it really worth adding 890k iconv dependance?

=?...?= encoding also adds just another bit of unnecessary bloat.