Re: More charset things

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> base64 is an encoding scheme (comparable to uuencode).  UTF-8 is a
> character set (comparable to ISO-8859-1).  They have nothing in common,
> at least not the way you are thinking of it.

UTF-8 is an encoding scheme, comparable to uuencode.

But it is currently used to encode one and only character set, the UCS
(described in Unicode manuals and within ISO 10646).  But theoretically,
it could well be used to encode other things.

Because the UTF-8 encoding scheme is used for only one charset, it is common
to consider that it is a charset itself, but this is a conceptual abuse.
I have nothing against relying on this abuse, which is quite handy, as
long as we do not loose sight of the real thing.  UTF-8 is not a charset,
in the deep nature of things. :-)

That is why Lars could well decide, one of these days, to support UTF-8 as
an encoding (which it really is) on the same level as Base64, and moreover,
rather fun to implement.  It might be convenient that Gnus do so as a
contribution to the Unicode effort, without really waiting for Emacs to
do it.  The sad aspect of things is that, for orthogonality reasons, Gnus
should then support UTF-7 as well, and this one, being sensibly uglier
internally, is not as much fun.

-- 
François Pinard                            mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Join the free Translation Project!    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard