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Re: UTF-8 versions (was: Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying)

2003-01-10 17:29:33

Andrew Gierth wrote:

since there have been no substantive changes made to UTF-8 _ever_
since its adoption as any sort of standard, why would you expect
future changes to introduce incompatibilities?

Bad premise; every time Unicode changes substantively, the utf-8
specification necessarily also changes since it is a Unicode to/from
octet stream transformation.  That definitely happened when Unicode
went from 3.0 to 3.1, and there is no guarantee that it won't happen
again.

When the Unicode consortium decides to include chicken scratching as
"characters" and extends the maximum width to beyond 32 bits, even
the 5- and 6-byte sequences (which exist in some "utf-8" specifications
on the octet-stream side, but not in others) will have to change.
In light of the 3.0->3.1 changes, somehow a smiley doesn't seem
appropriate...


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