Adam M. Costello writes: > There has been much debate about whether ACE should be phased out. > Even though people have different views, I don't think we really need > to debate this question.
There are two issues here. 1. Should applications be required to handle UTF-8 properly, in preparation for a UTF-8 world? The lessons of history are helpful at this point. If Keith Moore and his buddies had---with or without Quoted-Printable---required 8-bit-clean mail software in 1991, we wouldn't have sendmail's 8-bit bugs today. If they had thought a little more broadly and fixed other protocols, we would have been able to deploy UTF-8 years ago. Unfortunately, they, like you, didn't consider the long term. I don't know if they were as blatant as you in claiming that shortsightedness was a good thing; but the bottom line is that they, like you, made a decision destined to look really stupid to future users. 2. Should short-term plans be considered in the context of the desired transition to UTF-8? Common sense is helpful at this point. The cost of the long-term move to UTF-8 obviously depends on the choice of short-term plan. Consquently, ignoring the UTF-8 transition will not produce the same cost-benefit analysis as taking it into account. Here is one example of the variation in costs. Suppose we do a massive redeployment of mail-displaying programs etc. to present IDNA names as non-ASCII glyphs. Moving to UTF-8 then requires _another_ massive redeployment of those programs. In contrast, if IDNA were modified to also require proper display of UTF-8, programs dedicated to displays would require only one upgrade. Notice how a small change in the short-term plan provides huge long-term benefits---benefits that you are refusing to take into account. Even better, if we scrap this 7-bit garbage and move directly to UTF-8, _all_ programs will require at most one upgrade---maybe 0.5 on average. But you don't need to think about this possibility to understand why ignoring the long-term plan is stupid. ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
