Subject: Re: message lang tags verse SSH_MSG_KEXINIT

From: Frank Cusack <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 17:34:17 -0800

Another old message related to the keyboard-interactive draft.
(I believe the first occurence of a langauge tag was in that draft.)

On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 09:49:47PM -0500, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> [no attribution: ]
> > Are the drafts saying that I should send the language tag the client
> > and server agreed on at SSH_MSG_KEXINIT time as every message is
> > sent ?
> 
> one possible rationale has occurred to me:
> 
> Even if the peers negotiated that all messages will be in, say,
> martian, the server might not have translations for all possible
> messages, and might need to send some messages in a "default"
> language, in which case it should be tagged as such so it gets
> displayed appropriately (e.g., not using martian letters).

But isn't that impossible with UTF-8 encodings?  The client cannot display
the wrong letters (although it may not be able to display the letters
at all).  I am not that familiar with multi-byte encodings, but that
is my understanding.  Please clarify.

/fc

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 08:03:56 -0500

> is my understanding.  Please clarify.

If a display can only display US-ASCII and it is confronted with a
vowel containing a German umlaut, the display might well show the
vowel without the umlaut -- right ?

Not clear to me how UTF-8 encoding changes those sorts of functional
limits, particularly limits in older boxen.

Ran

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 07:59:07 +0100 (CET)

On 17 Jan, Frank Cusack wrote:
> But isn't that impossible with UTF-8 encodings?  The client cannot
> display the wrong letters (although it may not be able to display the
> letters at all).  I am not that familiar with multi-byte encodings,
> but that is my understanding.  Please clarify.

No, for some people utf-8 is not enough. Utf-8 did unify a number of
code-points in certain asian-languages, that is the letters are the same
but the expected glyphs are different. Therefore you must know which
language it is to be able to display it correctly. 

Actually it seems as if rfc2277 (section 4.2) mandates the current
behavior.

	/MaF