From: Terje Bless (link@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 13:00:11 CST
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> wrote:
>Terje Bless wrote:
>
>>...these aren't the only differences between UTF-8 and RFC2047. There
>>is a -- real or imagined, it matters nought -- feeling that UTF-8 is
>>just Yet Another Charset whilst RFC2047 is a Transfer Encoding Format.
>
>RFC 2047 isn't just a "Transfer Encoding Format".
That was sort of my point... :-)
Neither is Unicode, or even just UTF-8, "just another charset".
>>RFC2047 won't go away; it's just that it's turned out to not adequately
>>address the needs of a portion of the Netnews population.
>
>You keep chanting the mantra, but have yet to specify what supposed
>"needs" aren't satisfied.
Actually, I did specify them, I just didn't specify them in my reply to you
since they are completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Let me try to rephrase...
I observe that a significant portion of the Netnews community have elected
to reject RFC2047. I postulate, based on anecdotal evidence, that this is
due to some real or percieved inadequacy of RFC2047. I further posit that
since the years since its introduction and the changes made in at least one
update to it has so far failed to persuade this portion of the community to
adopt it, the likelyhood is very small that any further attempt to persuade
them will be successfull.
As best I can understand your position you feel that the proper response to
this is to ignore them since they have brought this situation on
themselves. Is my understanding correct?
>[...] If utf-8 were the panacea it's being hyped as, surely it's
>use over the past decade or so would have risen to something more
>than 0.006%.
First of all, I'm not hyping UTF-8 as a "panacea". I'm the first to admit
that there are problems with it. However I believe the problems will be at
least as great with any other proposed solution, but also, and more to the
point, I value different things then you when I weigh the pros and cons of
the different approaches.
I happen to believe that it is inappropriate to allow IMAP's "adoption" of
Netnews to constrain us too far (much like some email folk feel it
inappropriate to allow Netews' adoption of the RFC(2)822 message format to
constrain them too far). Given the choice of whom will be disadvantaged to
achieve interoperability, I hesitate very little to place the burden at the
feet of IMAP (you are of course free to disagree).
I also happen to be from one of those national hierarchies that have
standardized on untagged 8bit in headers, so their needs and concerns are
consequently rather important to me. This means I have direct experience
with what does and does not cause a real problem with 8bit in headers.
(Note well, I only claim familiarity with my own little cosy backwater of
Netnews -- with it's relatively simple and ASCIIpatible national charset --
and not with the major users such as the Chinese or other non-ASCIIpatible
character encodings.)
>Before utf-8 can become a blessed charset, the issue of RFC
>2277-compliant language tagging needs to be addressed.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the necessity for that, but since it
would certainly be nice to have I'll grant the possibility for now. The
constructive thing for you, as an obvious expert on these matters, to do
would be to suggest ways this can be achieved. I'm sure any help in fully
exploring all the alternatives would be very much appreciated by everyone.
-- Now Playing "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)" by "AC/DC"", from the album "Highway To Hell".