Tekniquelly correctMar 7
Whoa. UTF-8 is older now than ASCII was when UTF-8 was invented.
Show threadFarce MajeureMar 7
@tek and it still sucks
Show threadTekniquelly correctMar 7
@vathpela Awww, I like UTF-8! I can pretend it's ASCII most of the time.
Show threadFarce MajeureMar 7
@tek I have complaints about recoverability on a mildly corrupted bitstream, but it's much too late in the evening to articulate this well.
farhaven 🇪🇺Mar 7
Show threadElias MÃ¥rtenson

@vathpela @tek Given how much worse the alternatives are, and how impossible it would have been to get people to move off of encodings, I'm glad UTF-8 exists.

Don't take me wrong, I'm quite aware of the issues with UTF-8, but I (choose to) believe that if it wasn't for UTF-8 we'd still be drowning in ASCII, and it would be impossible to tell the English-only speaking minority that supporting letters other than what was used to write inscriptions in ancient Rome might actually be useful.

Mar 7 at 6:16amWeb
Show threadTekniquelly correctMar 7
@loke @vathpela I agree. The whole "all ASCII strings are the same series of bits as in UTF-8" was a stroke of brilliance. None of that BOM idiocy, i.e. "we'll define everything but leave the endianness up to the implementer", either.
Show threadEnno RehlingMar 7
@tek @loke @vathpela there is a BOM defined for UTF-8, as pointless as that may seem, and it's screwing up that whole beautiful ASCII compatibility whenever someone uses it.
Show threadElias MÃ¥rtensonMar 8

@enno @tek @vathpela I'd go as far as saying it's actively harmful. There are exactly zero cases when it's useful, and it will actively mess things up in most cases.

But, of course windows applications tend to add them at times.