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

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

[Klingon and Tengwar in Unicode]

> 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 have no idea. I was just looking for exotic examples and these two
were the second and third ones that came to my mind.

[...]
> 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.  

That's what the byte order mark is for.

> And concatenating two UTF-16 strings from different sources requires
> knowledge about the encoding. And surrogate pairs complicate matters
> as well.

Why do you think that surrogate pairs complicate matters? There can't
be any confusion whether an arbitrary 16 bit value is part a surrogate
pair or not; and if it is, whether it is the higher surrogate or the
lower one. As for concatenating I'd say this depends on whether the
tools are able to deal with it. But I do have to admit that I have
zero experience with UTF-16. I don't know how good it is in daily
use. I use only UTF-8. I mentioned UTF-16 only because I am told that
it is important in some areas (Java, MS Windows, XML ...).

    Oliver
-- 
29 Thermidor an 211 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!