Re: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Francois Yergeau <FYergeau@alis.com> writes:

>> > > UTF-8 never needs a 'byte-order' signature.
>> >
>> >This is unfortunately not true, except in the limited realm 
>> >of properly internationalized protocols
>> 
>> As for example IETF protocols.
>
> Errr, some IETF protocols.  I have no way to tell an FTP server what is the
> charset of a file I'm uploading, nor does the server have any way of telling
> me the charset of a file I'm downloading.  And even if it had a way (like in
> HTTP), the server most probably wouldn't know and would either not tell or
> lie.

Those protocols should be extended to send this information, since it
is not possible to handle text encoded in multiple encodings
otherwise.  I don't think it is for UTF-8 to solve these problems,
which BOM partially tries to do.  (HTTP supports this, the current FTP
extensions addresses it partially, lying implementations cannot be
standardized away though.)