Re: Locales: An Analysis

Larry Wall <[email protected]> writes:

> At any rate, in the unlikely event that we do ever go with fixed-width
> characters internally, I suspect we'll try to make it as transparent as
> possible, like we're doing now with UTF-8.  But I really think the
> interfaces are where the battle will be fought, and I think UTF-8 will
> prevail there in the long run, despite the early example of Java.  Linux
> is going to be all UTF-8, and between Linux and Java I think Java will
> find itself being wagged.

FWIW, from the standards front, the next revision of the news standards
will almost certainly be standardizing on UTF-8 as the character set for
headers (headers being particularly tricky since while you can use MIME to
specify a character set for the body, doing the same thing for the headers
requires relying on header order, which isn't a good idea), mostly based
on the expectation that the next revision of mail will do the same thing.

If we're right about where mail is going, and we haven't had objections
from the IETF at least so far, that's a pretty big chunk of text-based
Internet protocol that's going to UTF-8.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>