[rfc-i] I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-02.txt

[Dave CROCKER]

Paul Hoffman wrote:
> At 5:57 PM -0700 9/26/08, Fred Baker wrote:
>> OK, so tell me this. Can one read UTF8 while hanging upside down from 
>> a chin-up bar in the bowels of a machine room when <bleep> is 
>> happening and one really needs to get it right?
> 
> Yes. I have not come across a text editor or display program in the 
> past five years that would balk at showing you the file. 


During one or another of the IDN-or-related bits of working group confusion, I 
raised a concern that was in the same camp:  we have a long-standing lingua 
franca, called net-ascii, and the current effort was, in effect, to re-define it 
to be utf-8.

My obvious question was the same as here:  Has the world changed so much that we 
can honestly claim that it is universally -- not just "widely" supported as the 
least-common denominator in the character-encoding game.

Various folk with significant internet development and operations experience and 
a seriously conservative bent responded in the affirmative.

Personally, I'm still not comfortable with changing that base, but it's hard to 
call that anything more than being fixed in my ways...

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net