From: H. Peter Anvin Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 18:28:11 GMT Subject: Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml? Message-ID: <4380C03B.9090603@zytor.com> In-Reply-To: Johannes Schindelin wrote: > 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