Subject: [ldapext] new version of LDIF: charset vs. UTF-8

From: Yves Dorfsman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2008 14:27:12 -0700

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> Yves Dorfsman wrote:
>> Hmmm... I think the IBM server already has such an extension. With
>> utf-8 finally getting some traction, is there really any point to spend
>> any energy for other charset ?
> 
> I've no opinion, really.  UTF-8 has been "just about to take over the 
> world" for a decade now.  Maybe it's finally happening, but I'm not 
> holding my breath.  So as far as I'm concerned it'd be nice to have, but 
> low priority.

What would be nice to have, UTF-8 properly implemented, or the charset 
attribute ?

Yes, I do believe the world is moving to Unicode, and that pretty much 
everybody is using UTF-8 for it. Any new install of MS Windows and all the 
Linux distro I know of are installed by default in Unicode/UTF-8. Web 
browsers and mail clients support it, web pages are getting written in UTF-8 
(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51.html)

If anything, rather than a charset attribute, I'd rather see an encoding one 
for people who do use UTF-16 etc... 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Disadvantages_3).But again, this is not 
really trivial, so I see this as out of scope for this change.

> 
>> What would the other charsets offer that utf-8 cannot, I mean beyond
>> not having to convert ?
> 
> Well, support for other applications than LDAPv3, since LDAPv3 will 
> require the LDIF parser to charset-convert to UTF-8.  But if such a thing
> would need non-UTF-8 support it would likely have it now anyway.
> 

Right.

-- 
Yves.
http://www.sollers.ca/blog

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