> On Nov 30, 2005, at 2:54 PM, Frank Ellermann wrote: > > > As Bob said raw UTF-8 > > characters won't fly with `cat rfc4567 > /dev/lpt1` and other > > simple uses of RFCs. > > 1. I wonder what proportion of the population prints things this way? > 2. If the file is correctly encoded in UTF-8 and the above doesn't > work, then your operating system is buggy. I guess that depends on your definition of "buggy". The most popular OS in the world no longer natively supports printing of _any_ kind of flat files - you have to have a special application to do that. While most people would agree that that OS is buggy, its inability to print flat files was a deliberate design choice and is therefore more properly termed a "crippling feature". Also, the vast majority of printers in use don't natively support printing of utf-8, thus forcing users to layer each of their computer systems with more and more buggy cruft just to do simple tasks like printing plain text. Perhaps those are buggy also? These days, your best bet for getting utf-8 files to print is to use a web browser's print command, which is doable but can be fairly cumbersome as compared to typing a simple "lpr" command. Unfortunately, most web browsers fail to preserve page breaks (FF characters) when printing flat text files, which makes the resulting documents hard to read. HTML with utf-8 actually displays and prints more portably than plain text with utf-8, though it's not clear how many browsers support the style sheet extensions enough to print page breaks in the right places. Also, HTML is still somewhat of a moving target and it is somewhat unclear whether any particular subset of HTML that is used today will still be effectively presented 10-20 years from now. The biggest problems with HTML are (a) no way to include images in the document without external links (yes I know about MHTML but it's not as widely supported); (b) difficulty in finding authoring tools that will produce output in a subset of HTML that we define; (c) avoiding the temptation to make the documents pretty rather than readable. It's hard to escape the conclusion that we're trying very hard to make our document processing much more complex for a very marginal gain. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf