On 6 Oct, 2008, at 11:38, John C Klensin wrote:
(2) The document seems to assume that availability of UTF-8 systems (or other systems based on Unicode with easy transcoding) is now near-ubiquitous. Actual experience, especially with documents being transmitted between computers by email and similar means, appears to be different. While I look forward to the day at which comprehensive UTF-8 support is universally available, at least as an interchange format, I do not believe that we are there yet...
John, Paul Hoffman appears to be operating on the assumption that UTF-8-capable software is widely available today on most platforms; you appear to believe otherwise.
It might be helpful if both of you (and others) could provide specific examples supporting those positions. Then we can work out how many people in reality are likely to have trouble reading UTF-8 documents.
Speaking from my own experience, Unicode and UTF-8 have been supported in all versions of Mac OS X, and in Mac OS 9 before that. This means that any Macintosh computer sold in about the last ten years can handle UTF-8. Windows, Linux, etc., have probably had UTF-8 support for a similar length of time (others may be able to supply precise dates). A ten-year old Mac running Mac OS 9 certainly won't be able to display every glyph in today's Unicode character set, but it can read a UTF-8 format file, decode the bytes correctly, display the Unicode characters it knows, and display placeholders for the ones it doesn't. Perhaps a workable compromise is to specify UTF-8 as the encoding for RFCs, but limited today to some subset of the full Unicode character set.
Stuart Cheshire <cheshire@xxxxxxxxx> * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Inc. * Internet Architecture Board * www.stuartcheshire.org _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf