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Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2003-01-03 19:43:04

rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu (Russ Allbery)  wrote on 02.01.03 in 
<ylk7hnwi2d(_dot_)fsf(_at_)windlord(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu>:

I never understood what was wrong with RFC 2047 encoding, at least for
everything except the Newsgroups header (which poses some special
challenges), but many other people on USEFOR seem to feel that it would be
a catastrophically bad decision, and as I only speak English, I don't feel
particularly well-qualified to comment.

Very shortly put, there is a long tradition on Usenet of passionately  
hating 2047 encoding in at least some quarters. Note the word  
"passionately"; it is not exaggerated. Long flamewars have been fought  
about this before anyone even thought about USEFOR.

My only personal stance on this is that I consider it a serious,  
inexcusable bug that 2821/2822 do not allow naked UTF-8 in headers.  
Frankly, "we once made the mistake to spec 7 bits so this must remain 7  
bit forever" is absolutely and inexcusably insane. But that is a mail  
problem, not a news problem.

The majority of folks on USEFOR also seem to me to have bought
wholeheartedly into the concept of Unicode and the belief that Unicode
will displace all other character sets in the near future, that all

Incidentally, so has the IETF, judging by the charsets-in-RFCs RFC.

software will soon expect any untagged 8-bit data to be in Unicode, and

That part is baseless exaggeration.

that handling Unicode is all that's necessary to move forward into the

Not exactly "all that's necessary": necessary, and would solve all charset  
problems except the one that people do still use other charsets.

non-ASCII world.  I part company some on that point; these days, Unicode
looks to me a lot more like IPv6, namely a better technical concept that
may eventually get quietly deployed but that isn't going to change the
world any time soon.

It's already started changing the world, and is already deployed in  
absolutely fucking *HUGE* numbers. Remember, for example, *every* WinNT- 
based machine has it in the OS interfaces (in the form of UTF-16). Given  
that XP is WinNT-based, that's a lot. (And for Win95-based machines  
there's a standard upgrade.) Also, Linux distributions seem to be  
switching to use UTF-8 as base character set, too. MacOS X, ditto UTF-16.

There's a lot more applied Unicode around than IPv6.

MfG Kai

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