Subject: Ftp-WG: comment on I18N draft

From: Alex Belits <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 May 1999 06:19:06 -0400

On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Curtin, William wrote:

> The only comment that I've received on the I18N draft came from Hunter
> Hudson (see below). Does anyone else support the ability of the client to
> explicitly turn on UTF encoding? 

  The main problem is, it's "turned on" by default, with no means to do
anything non-ASCII without it.

  I from the very beginning proposed the transparent handling of filenames
by default and labeling of charset/language (including Unicode) in all
cases when it's known (like in MIME), so negotiation (and possibility to
refuse if impossible) of UTF-8 could be implemented easily. However it
looks like the goal of people here is not to make a usable standard but to
to push Unicode and UTF-8 as mandatory by providing no means for
transparent handling of unlabeled text (in non-unicode charset, and with
FTP server that has no knowledge of charset used).

  If anyone here still cares, I, and thousands of other people still
oppose this "Unicode is mandatory" policy. The standard, based on this
policy, will be ignored for one simple reason -- impossibility of
implementation on systems that don't use Unicode and don't have any
charset-labeling mechanism on filesystem level. So far all Unix flavors
are in this category -- they can be used with UTF-8, however for various
reasons no one does that.

  I hope, this explains the remarkable disinterest in this standard.

-- 
Alex