Language tags in IPP (was: Re: [Suppress-Script] Initial list of 300 languages)

[Mark Crispin]

I think that you may have missed my point.

Within the email world, the need to *NOT* use UTF-8 for outgoing email is 
rapidly vanishing.

This, in turn, makes it viable to construct email applications that only 
generate UTF-8 email, even if they accept email in other charsets (and 
promptly convert it to Unicode internally).  Given what a pain in the 
posterior it is to deal with generating multiple character sets, it is 
becoming VERY tempting for software implementors to do just that.

The point of my message is that not even traditional applications (such as 
Pine) are standing in the way of this from happening any more.  Mass 
market applications, such as Outlook and Mozilla, haven't been in the way 
for ages; in fact, they helped force it along.

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, McDonald, Ira wrote:
> Ned - thanks for your illuminating note on email - but
> Mark seems to have missed the point entirely - to whit,
> support for UTF-8 in email readers has NOTHING to do with
> administrators and users actually throwing away their
> "legacy" email systems and moving to pure Unicode.
> There are lots of benefits to Unicode - thus IPP specs have
> always REQUIRED support for UTF-8 by all printers.  But it
> will be many years before most _deployed_ applications make
> it reasonable to shift to Unicode everywhere, if ever.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.