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

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
[...]
> It would be foolish not to use Unicode for any _new_ protocols or
> formats.  But for legacy systems like email and Usenet backward
> compatibility is really, really important.  If you look at how
> e.g. MIME or format=flowed was designed, you'll see that a lot of
> effort and thought was spent on minimizing negative effects for
> existing clients.
>
> You need an especially good excuse to break existing stuff.  The fact
> that Unicode is a technically more pleasing solution just isn't a good
> enough reason to break things unnecessarily, IMHO.
[...]

I have to admit that this is a very strong argument. It could
probably convince me, if the situation in Usenet were not already
such a mess. I agree that it is sometimes a good thing to preserve a
current working state in order to maximize compatibility. But
sometimes it is a good thing to dare a reform. Which is the case for
Usenet is probably a matter of estimation. I think I have stated most
of my arguments.

At least I shouldn't smile upon people anymore who use plain ASCII in
the de.* hierarchy. One could probably rather convince me to use ASCII
than to use, say, Latin-9.

> > My guess -- by the way -- is that Unicode will become increasingly
> > important in Europe, especially for the members of the EU. We'd need
> > at least Latin-1/Latin-9, Latin-2 and Greek (ISO 8859-7). And I am not
> > sure if that already covers Latvian, Romanian and others. There will
> > be a growing need for an encoding that covers all of these languages.

> I think most Western European users don't care about and don't know
> how to access any glyph that isn't printed on the keyboard.

My guess is that the usage of UTF-8 in Europe will start in business
e-eail and spread from there. But maybe this is not my actual
point. It's rather that I want it to be easy to mix different
languages freely. Why shouldn't a Pole or a Chinese posting a German
message to the de.* hierarchy sign with his or her Chinese of Polish
name? Why not a Greek verse in the signature? Or an Arabian proverb?
Many people would't do it, unless they can be sure that it wouldn't
garble their umlauts for some people, however small or great their
number may be. This is decent, but I also find it suboptimal. It won't
change, until UTF-8 becomes the default.

    Oliver
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