- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:19:09 -0700
- To: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Cc: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
On Mar 26, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Martin Duerst wrote: >>>> >>>> We are simply passing through the one and only defined i18n >>>> solution >>>> for HTTP/1.1 because it was the only solution available in 1994. > > "The only solution available in 1994" is a far stretch. Unicode > was available then. But I agree that the choice, in 1994 terms, > wasn't as bad as an idea as it looks now. Unicode was available but unusable as a superset of ASCII. UTF-8 was defined but not published to the people who would actually use it. Fonts were conceived but not distributed. No matter how you spin it, Unicode did not become a legitimate choice worldwide until 1995 (when both Win95 and Java started distributing the beginnings of a usable UTF-16 support), and did not become usable in text headers until UTF-8 was popularized by folks outside Uniforum much later. In any case, UTF-8 would have been chosen today if we could get four people to implement it instead of just talking on IETF lists. The standard specifies iso-8859-1 because that is what all implementations implemented at that time, not because it was the most popular choice of standards mavens. I don't care what the encoding of TEXT is in HTTP so long as there are implementations that are interoperable. ....Roy
Received on Thursday, 27 March 2008 17:19:53 UTC