[rfc-i] New version: draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-04.txt

[Julian Reschke]

Joe Touch wrote:
>> Any hard numbers about it? Guesses are not allowed. Remember that RFC
>> authors are not representative of the general computer users.
>>
>> Anecdotal evidence: when you are at an IETF meeting, in the back of
>> the room, and you look forward, most of the laptops run Unix.
> 
> The issue with interpreting .utf8 or BOM is primarily a reader issue,
> not an author issue. I agree that RFC authors are primarily IETF
> attendees (though you ought to cite statistics on that if you require me
> to back up my assertions as well), but RFC readers are probably not
> primarily RFC attendees (do we really need to dig those numbers out? or
> can we just agree on that?)

I do agree that most consumers of RFCs do not attend IETF meetings.

However I do disagree that the statistics on OS usage apply to the 
typical consumer of an RFC; the percentage of MacOSX and Linux users 
will be much higher.

That being said -- it shouldn't matter. Indeed, support for Unicode in 
general and UTF-8 in text files in particular probably is better on 
Windows then elsewhere.

BR, Julian