I'd like to make an observation. According to Markus Kuhn, Ken Thompson designed UTF-8. This is not quite true. Ken Thompson (according to Markus) designed FSS-UTF. Although, the 10646 Working Group based the design of UTF-8 on FSS-UTF, UTF-8 and FSS-UTF are very similar but not the same.
As I recall, the ISO/IEC 10646 Working Group was aware of the X-Open, FSS-UTF. UTF-8 is a variation of FSS-UTF but not the exact algorithm of FSS-UTF. UTF-8 accounted for the surrogates of UTF-16 by forcing a conversion of any text encoded with UTF-16 to UCS-4 (32-bit form) and then converting text encoded in UCS-4 to UTF-8. This modification made it illegal to convert the 1024 surrogate code points of 10646/Unicode to UTF-8. Part of the confusion today is that some vendors implemented FSS-UTF but called it UTF-8. UTF-8 is not FSS-UTF. and FSS-UTF is not UTF-8. Ed Hart Edwin F. Hart Applied Physics Laboratory 11100 Johns Hopkins Road Laurel, MD 20723-6099 USA +1-443-778-6926 (Baltimore Area) +1-240-228-6926 (Washington DC Area) +1-443-778-1093 (facsimile) [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Markus Kuhn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 10:23 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Revision of UTF-8 history in draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-05.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-05.txt Francois, The currently ongoing revision of the UTF-8 RFC may be a good opportunity to unrewrite the history of this encoding and to finally acknowledge that what we know today as UTF-8 was actually designed by Ken Thompson in the presence of Rob Pike during the evening hours of 1992-09-02 in a New Jersey diner. It was then taken on board the standards bandwagon by the X/Open joint i18n group, who had drafted an earlier FSS-UTF shortly before (the one you quote), which however had less useful synchronization properties and was therefore quickly forgotten about. See my short UTF-8 history on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#history for details and witness testimony. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
