--On Friday, January 03, 2003 1:14 PM +0000 Charles Lindsey
<chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> wrote:
In <ylk7hnwi2d(_dot_)fsf(_at_)windlord(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu> Russ Allbery
<rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu>
writes:
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.
I think it is a general belief that cramming 8 bits into 7 was never going
to be the solution for the long term. Does anyone really believe that we
shall still be using $RFC 2047 encoding in 20 years time? There is just
too much effort being expended in writing code to encode and decode
things. That may be acceptable for mainstream servers and user agents, but
it is an utter pain for people who write scripts and filters for special
purpose uses. Yes, there are some nice facilities in the Perl CPAN
library, but it is still hard work to use them.
UTF-8 is an encoding. What Windows uses (UTF-16) is an encoding.
I'll leave it as a question to the reader whether or not UCS-4 is an
encoding. (Big endian or little endian?)
Larry