From: J.B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 15:04:09 CST
On 2/14/03 3:10 PM, Russ Allbery at <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
> 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.
That's not how *I* am reading Bruce Lilly -- it seems to me that he is
saying that 7 bits is it (as far as the standard goes) until all of the old
software is no longer used. So that even if all of the users decided to
switch tomorrow, the standard should stay the same.
> 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%.
I don't think that's really a good question -- because it's not how many
will switch in the short term, it's how many do we plan on for the /long/
term. In the short term I'd expect something like 15-30% (of articles)
within a year or so of a standards release as NS and MS and Agent are all
upgraded to recognize and generate it by default -- it's not a hard step,
even for MS (and in the case of MS it seems to fit within /their/ plans). I
don't think that 99% would be unreasonable for 5 years, certainly not for
10.
But the change has to start sometime, and it might as well be now as 10
years from now -- because the most significant change between now and then
will be how used they are to doing it the way are they are now.
-- J.B. Moreno