Subject: Re: [idn] I fear I cannot use IDN in the next 10 years

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 09:59:28 EDT

In a message dated 2001-10-05 0:39:39 Pacific Daylight Time, [email-masked] 
writes:

>  Clearly the world wants a UCS. While it is true that nobody can guarantee
>  that this will be 10646/Unicode, we can all be certain that it absolutely
>  WON'T be ASCII. What we can also be sure of is that UTF-8 will be the
>  favored encoding for the future that we can see.

You can't be sure about UTF-8 unless you can guarantee 10646/Unicode.  UTF-8 
doesn't exist outside of Unicode.  Or perhaps I misunderstood Eric's 
statement.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California

---

From: David Hopwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 12:00:15 +0100

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[email-masked] wrote:
> You can't be sure about UTF-8 unless you can guarantee 10646/Unicode.

ACE also relies on 10646/Unicode, so any speculation about hypothetical
UCSs other than 10646/Unicode isn't relevant to the arguments about the
merits of ACE and/or UTF-8.

It's perfectly clear that UTF-8 is the favoured charset for both new
IETF protocols and revisions of existing IETF protocols: [BCP18] says so,
and [BCP18] has widespread support among designers and implementors.
If anyone seriously disputes this, they must not be looking at the same
Internet that the rest of us are looking at.

[BCP18] IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages. H. Alvestrand.
        January 1998. Also RFC2277.

- -- 
David Hopwood <[email-masked]>

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