- From: Keld J|rn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 00:32:31 +0200
- To: John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net>, Dan Oscarsson <Dan.Oscarsson@trab.se>
- Cc: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no, uri@bunyip.com, fielding@kiwi.ICS.UCI.EDU
John Klensin writes about use of UTF-8 and penalties in size and readability for various user communities. Some remarks: I think the size issue is not important. Consider how many bytes there are in a package, and the typical round-trip latencies adding say 5-50 bytes for URLs because of UTF-8 expansion is not so important, considering also the frequency of URLs in normal retrieval of web pages. Performance penalties would be close to not noticeable IMHO. You must also weight this against the advantages of UTF-8, namely a clear and easy migration path for the majority of URLs today, encoded in US-ASCII: the migration is simply no change. Maybe John wants to be able to use other charsets for encoding an URL. I actually proposed some time ago a solution labelling the encoding of the URL in a "URL-charset:" header and a having UTF-8 as default, and I remember somebody else also proposing charset labelling - on the URL line. I have not at this time evaluated such proposals compared to Martin and Frangois's proposals, but it is clear that the intended functionality is the same - and my old proposal could be seen as an extension to Martin/Frangois - but I am not sure it is necessary. Keld
Received on Tuesday, 15 April 1997 18:33:18 UTC