From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 17:53:03 CST
J B Moreno <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> On 2/14/03 3:10 PM, Russ Allbery at <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> 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.
That's not a disagreement with the question, that's just adding a
clarification to it. I think that clarification is fair, although I
suppose there's also a rate of change component.
> 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.
So it sounds like you feel that 99% of people need to change for the
change to be worthwhile, but you believe that will happen in five years.
I agree with you that 99% of people will need to change for the change to
be worthwhile. I disagree with your forcasting of the future.
> But the change has to start sometime,
No, it doesn't. Like it or not, e-mail and news do, in fact, continue to
function without this change, even for non-English text, even using
national character sets.
The quality of this debate would probably be improved if people would
clearly distinguish between what they feel *should* happen, what *has*
happened, what *must* happen, and what they *hope* will happen. Right
now, people on both sides of this discussion seem to be mixing those
concepts without distinction.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>