From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 11:48:03 CST
Terje Bless <link@pobox.com> writes:
> In short, everything I see suggests "Unicode" is where the world is
> headed and you'd need to talk pretty fast to convince me that one of its
> transformational formats will _not_ be the "native representation" of
> all modern OSes (excluding Embedded systems and similar which may have
> extreme needs). Are you seriously going to argue that an OS with Unicode
> facilities will have trouble dealing with UTF-8 because it uses UTF-16
> for preference?
I'm saying that UTF-8 will still be, for that OS, an *encoding* that has
to be undone. You're not actually getting to "just put the bits on the
wire," which is the world that proponents of UTF-8 seem to believe that
they're going to be living in. You still have to encode and decode the
bits, at which point it's just as easy to use RFC 2047 as well.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>