Unicode

Many mis-features of current HTML could be repaird by the using of Unicode. Unicode is a panacea for many typesetting and editing illnesses, and I sincerely hope that more Unices go Unicode in the near future. Plan-9 is already Unicode-only!

RFC 1641 proposes the use of Unicode in MIME messages.

To avoid encoding large amounts of ASCII text in base64 when only a few ``true Unicode'' characters are used, RFC 1642 proposes an ``inline base-64'' encoding called UTF-7 (the HTMLized version at the Unicode Web Site is better legible). IMHO, UTF-7 sucks, but then I am no great fan of MIME's =xx encoding.

There is no newsgroup dedicated to Unicode (yet), most UNICODE-related discussion occurs in comp.std.internat.


There are people working on adapting Unicode to HTML, amongst them the (Japan-based) mailing lists www-mling and www-request@unicode.org.
This page is part of the Trash Heap.