ietf-822
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Re: quoted-printable

1992-02-12 18:11:35
Walt Daniels writes:
Quoted-printable seems like excess baggage.  It is in fact
nothing more than a poor man's version of mneumonic and I don't like
mneumonic very much either.  If you need something of this form, then
the UTF of ISO 10646 DIS 2 is a better candidate.  (Yeah, I know that
is 8 bit - but it would provide an incentive :-).

Well, the fact that it is 8-bit may not be such a problem in certain
parts of the world (e.g. eunet).

But UTF is quite interesting, actually. First, the Unicoders want to
have a uniform encoding, where every character is 16 bits. No hassles,
easy programming, etc etc etc.

Then they realize that Unicode would be hard to introduce in certain
areas, such as the "Internet" (yes, they actually use this word). So
they conjure up a transformation format (UTF) which allows the
characters found in the ASCII character set to be encoded in the same
way as ASCII. This is a pretty good idea. I'd say that it is going in
the right direction.

But aren't we forgetting something here? Would UTF be readable in
Japan? Japan has a large and established email community. We can't
simply ignore them.

So my question to you is: Are you suggesting to the Japanese that they
migrate to UTF? Have you thought about how much work that would be? Do
you think that it is likely?

More importantly, have you asked the Japanese what they think about
this plan -- no, I mean -- this decision?


Erik


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