Hey Alan!

 AI> It would be best if we moved to UTF-8 natively but that could get
 AI> messy

There is an understatement if I've ever seen one.  So far I have only seen
one web based BBS that can get the word wrapping right and it is in Russia.
 Others I've seen get the characters correctly but then count them as bytes
instead of characters so that word wrapping will be thrown off.  Add to
that the fact that ansi BBSes cannot count higher than 80 and it gets even
messier .... nevermind smart devices that cannot even count anywhere near
80 characters.

If you were asking me, and I know that you weren't, the two digit year is a
MUCH bigger issue and given it has been roughly 17 years since it was
declared obsolete I don't hold out much faith in ANYTHING ever being fixed
in Fidonet ... unless of course you're like me and totally take advantage
of FTN crippleware and ignore the obvious weaknesses such as datetime
stamps, CHRS and UTC offset kludges, etc.  Also while I am ranting, all the
crappy binary data in headers, especially the pktHeader which are nothing
but wasted byes.

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 5.0.7(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)