Re: [Ltru] UTF-8

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John Cowan yazmış:
> GerardM scripsit:
> 
>> It happens often that exactly because of the content is NOT UTF-8 that
>> I get the information mangled. With UTF-8 you either get the message
>> or it will be indicated that you have insufficient fonts installed. The
>> notion that the current encoding always works is wrong.
> 
> It always works for ASCII text, and the Registry is restricted to
> ASCII text.
Well, i think for me the interest is whether the next release could
mandate UTF-8, so that we don't have to deal w/ escapes.
I guess there are 2 issues:
1. Email clients
2. Browser clients

On 1:
If you can see s w/ cedilla on the first line above, then your email
client handled UTF-8; if not maybe you could try choosing UTF-8 encoding
manually. I know that Thunderbird and Outlook don't have a problem w/
UTF-8. What other email clients are we talking about? If your pine
client thru your shell can't handle it, then really you will only have
few characters mangled, because charactes overlapping w/ ASCII are
rendered the same whether it's UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. Then you still have
an option of using another email client to UTF-8 appropriately when you
really care.

On 2:
I don't think any up-to-date browsers have any problem w/ UTF-8 (IE,
firefox, seamonkey, opera). The only ones that would have problem could
be cell-phone based ones that don't belong to one of the brands above
and some shell-based ones, which probably depends on what shell is being
used. And then again i'd say it's not a big deal, because you can use
another client to read stuff if you care. Besides the pros of not having
to deal w/ escapes outweigh the cons of not having UTF-8 support on some
cell-phone devices and some shells.

So what exactly email and browser clients are we talking about that
don't support UTF-8? If it's only a matter of email, we could say: "when
using email, you can send requests using escapes, but these escapes will
be posted in UTF-8 in the registry"? If we adopt UTF-8 for new
submissions, we could also say "starting on <someDate/> all character
escapes in the registry will be converted to UTF-8."

Most importantly, if UTF-8 is going to be easier for 95% of mainstream
users, couldn't we tell 5% of peculiar users to deal w/ it? The registry
for the internet should probably be based on up-to-date technologies,
rather than trying to accommodate obsolete ones as well, which i think
are used to rarely to be cared about anyway.

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