Re: draft-hoffman-rfc1738bis-02.txt

At 11:10 AM +0200 4/26/04, Julian Reschke wrote:
><http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hoffman-rfc1738bis-02.txt>
>
>Section 2.7, file:
>
>I still think that if the current RFC is updated, the new version 
>should at least recommend one specific encoding for representing 
>non-ASCII characters in filenames (and of course this one should be 
>UTF-8).

This implies that filesystems use a character encoding (as compared 
to pure binary with no text-like semantics). That is probably true in 
well over 90% of all file systems.

However, it also implies that character encoding is choosable by 
users, and I think that is not the case in many systems. That is, 
many systems will only allow an ISO 8859-x encoding for file names. 
What you are asking is that the names in those cases must be 
re-encoded from the "native" encoding to the standard encoding.

That will (a) induce errors, particularly when people don't bother to 
re-encode and (b) increase interoperability. How do people feel about 
this balance?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

Received on Monday, 26 April 2004 12:01:41 UTC