[gopher] RFC submission?

[Nuno Silva]

On 2015-01-03 19:46, James Mills wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 7:14 PM, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva at ist.utl.pt> wrote:
> 
> > a) We have no way to convert all the gopherspace to utf8, assuming utf8
> > in some clients will probably break compatibility with older gopherholes
> > or older content. Perhaps some clients could implement some kind of
> > content sniffing to tell utf8 apart from ISO8859-*. But, as utf8 is
> > quite new compared to gopher, I'm not sure it is even a good idea to use
> > utf8 (although I do use it myself): wouldn't it break older clients as
> > well?
> >
> 
> My only retort to this is that UTF-8
> drgrades gracefully to ISO-8859-1

Aren't you mixing ISO-8859-1 with ASCII? AFAIK, the first 128 bytes in
utf8 represent the same as they represent in ASCII. While Wikipedia says
that "ISO-8859-1 was incorporated as the first 256 code points of
ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode.", this is, if I'm not mistaken, the
*character set*, not the encoding for these characters. In the specific
case of utf8, the lowest 128 codepoints are represented in a way that is
compatible with ASCII (and thus with ISO-8859-*[1]), but other codepoints
above 128, even those from ISO-8859-1, aren't compatible with ISO-8859-1.

See, for example,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81#Character_mappings

[1] https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html#asciiext


-- 
Nuno Silva (aka njsg)
Helsinki, Finland