Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml?

From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Nov 20, 2005, 18:28 UTC
Message-ID: <4380C03B.9090603@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0511190101590.28126@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Kay Sievers wrote:
> 
> 
>>Yes, convince the git maintainers, that it's incredibly stupid not to
>>enforce utf8 in commit messages. It makes absolutely zero sense in a
>>SCM, which merges forth and back between people around the world to
>>allow random encodings from the last century.
> 
> 
> Oh, but it makes sense! Just because you happen to work on a very 
> international project does not mean everybody does.
> 
> Just because you happen to like utf-8 does not mean that you still do in 
> 2046. The encoding-du-jour might well be a 64-bit wide char code by then, 
> since they'll laugh about our dreaming about terabytes.
> 
> BTW, utf-8 was designed on purpose to be easily distinguishable from other 
> encodings so that you don't have to rely on every document obeying a 
> certain encoding.
>

No, it wasn't. It was designated on purpose to be ASCII-compatible, substring-safe, and minimally stateful.

Furthermore, it's extensible. Although the original UTF-8 is limited to 31 bits, and the officially published UTF-8 is further crippled to 21 bits by Mirco$oft cronies who wanted it to be brainfuck-compatible with UTF-16, it could easily be extended to 64 bits or beyond.

I think it's *definitely* safe to say that whatever encoding we'll use in 2046, current UTF-8 will be a subset. If you don't believe me, consider how long we've had ASCII and the first of the design criteria for UTF-8 that I listed in the first paragraph.

	-hpa