Solving the UTF-8 problem

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 02:38:28PM -0700,
 Doug Ewell <dewell at roadrunner.com> wrote 
 a message of 72 lines which said:

> I will note that I couldn't open the UTF-8 Registry at langtag.net
> in this way, because Stéphane named it
> language-subtag-registry.utf8.  Many operating systems including
> Windows, and many browsers including IE, know what to do with files
> with a .txt extension but have no idea what to do with a .utf8 file.
> I suggest changing the naming convention for UTF-8 files on
> langtag.net from "something.utf8" or "something.txt.utf8" to
> "something.utf8.txt" to take advantage of this.

I hesitate here because the www.langtag.net Web site sends the proper
file type:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

If IE does not understand that the file is plain text encoded in
UTF-8, it is broken.

Using the file extension to find its type is both non-standard (why
".txt" instead of ".text"? Where is the registry of file extensions?)
and quite old-fashioned.

Advices?