Egmont wrote: > On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 06:12:13PM +0200, Thomas Wolff wrote:
> > I have not heard anything like this before (about changing behaviour > > of emitted replacement characters) > So far there lived two concurrent definitions of UTF-8, one defined it to be > at most 4 bytes long, while the other one defined 6 bytes. > If I correctly understand the thread that's just been discussed on this > list, starting at: > http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/2007-04/msg00050.html > then from now on everyone defines UTF-8 to be at most 4 bytes long. The paper mentioned there is only a discussion paper - some personal opinion. It starts: "Doc Type Working Group Document Title Synchronization Issues for UTF-8 Source Ken Whistler Status Individual Contribution" And I don't think there can be "concurrent definitions" of UTF-8. UTF-8 is clearly defined by RFC 2279 which maintains the clear 1-to-6-bytes encoding scheme of RFC 2044 with no confusion - and will hopefully remain so. This definition is not affected by the question of whether any of the encoded code points is "invalid" or anything else. > And in this case I think the proper behavior would be to emit 5 or 6 bytes. Don't think so but that doesn't matter as it isn't a case anyway :) > Think of it: this is what you would do if 5 and 6 byte UTF-8 wasn't ever > defined. It was and it is defined, so no confusion needed. > > Why cannot a long UTF-8 sequence that happens to map to a code point which > > is > > not Unicode just be displayed with one replacement character? > I'd perfectly agree with you, I also dislike this 4-byte limitation and > preferred the 6-byte version. But apparently this is not what Unicode-gurus > have decided to have. That's why I'm asking gurus here (especially Markus) > what to do know. Thanks for agreeing with me, so let's stick to the formal definition which does not call for any change. I hope Ken Whistler is reading this. Does he have a mail address? Thomas -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
