From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 16 2003 - 15:14:37 CST
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery 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
> Flag days on the scale of something as large as Usenet, let alone all of
> Usenet plus all of email, simply do not happen. And pretending that
> they might is just a pipe dream. Better to focus on feasible, practical
> solutions instead.
Yes, I think that should be taken as implied by the general tone of how I
expressed that. Nothing on the Internet happens all at once tomorrow. :)
There have been sweeping changes made to all of Usenet in the past. For
example, overview was introduced. And then later, Xref was added to
overview on essentially every site. yEnc was introduced. Control
messages were changed from unsigned to signed. All of these changes took
years to happen, though, and were possible mostly because they were
backwardly compatible with fairly graceful degredation.
Whether or not introducing UTF-8 is backwardly compatible with fairly
graceful degredation seems to be one of the points of debate.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>