Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

> In the future, when UTF-8 will be the default in Mail and News, this
> shouldn't be a problem anymore. People who read mailing lists about
> classical Greek, will make sure that they have a font containing
> “Greek Extended”; the regulars of alt.fan.tolkien (whatever) will make
> sure that they can display Tengwar, Star Trek fans will use fonts
> including Klingon etc. etc.

Wasn't the Klingon proposal for Unicode rejected?  Tengwar has been a
proposal for ten years, or so, and nothing has happend, as far as I
know.

> I really hope for a future (however remote it may be), where I can be
> sure that every text file I find on a computer is either ASCII, UTF-8
> or UTF-16.

UTF-16?  It's not even a well define encoding scheme, two files may
contain the exact same Unicode code points, but may differ in a binary
comparison, due to byte ordering.  And concatenating two UTF-16
strings from different sources requires knowledge about the encoding.
And surrogate pairs complicate matters as well.

> When we'll look back then, we will regard this whole ISO 8859-soup
> as something as strange and weird as EBDIC.

I wish I could be that optimistic.