From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 14:10:38 CST
J B Moreno <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> On 2/14/03 1:20 PM, Russ Allbery at <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> Again, this isn't the only question. There are two questions: whether
>> we can convince people to use UTF-8 or not, and whether convincing some
>> people to use UTF-8 will result in a net improvement in the current
>> situation.
> Sloppy wording on my point -- I thought the "enough people to be worth
> while" was inherent in my use of "people"; but apparently not
> (convincing the odd person here or there wouldn't make a difference).
I just wanted to make that explicit, since as near as I can tell, the root
of the disagreement that we have here now is primarily over exactly what
degree of change would be "worthwhile."
I think that we can likely mostly agree that if everyone using Usenet and
e-mail would switch to using just UTF-8 instead of any national character
set tomorrow, that would be worthwhile, a substantial and desireable
improvement on the current status quo from the perspective of the
cleanliness of the message format, and would be worth making changes to
the standard to support.
The primary points of disagreement appear, to me at least, to be over the
percentage of people who would change to UTF-8 (the first question I list
above), and the percentage of people who would need to change to UTF-8 in
order to have that shift constitute an improvement over what's happening
now rather than just the introduction of yet another unlabelled 8-bit
character set (the second question).
I get the feeling that some people would answer 25% or 50% to the second
question and others would answer 99%.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>