Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cogburnd02 2405 days ago
> mentions UTF-7 (don't)

Wait, what's so wrong about mentioning UTF-7? Wasn't it just a (proposed but abandoned) way to represent Unicode characters in MIME email?

1 comments

Yeah, I meant don't use it. It seems to confuse things to even bring it up.
Kinda half-sad it didn't make it. Would have been cool to able to "see" behind the curtains of UTF strings. As it is now, you can only paste a UTF string in a UTF aware environment, and you also need the correct fonts etc.

It would have been cool to be able to incrementally upgrade legacy environments to use UTF via UTF-7. Unaware parts would just have displayed the encoding. String lengths would have sort of worked.

(All of these things would of course have come with horrible drawbacks, so in that alternative universe I might have been cursing that we got UTF-7...)

UTF-8 is the sane incremental path from ASCII.