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The note about IRC reminds me of troubles that faced Finnish IRC users when UTF-8 got more popular. Since IRC networks generally didn't (and don't) have actual
by Ndymium 5y ago
The note about IRC reminds me of troubles that faced Finnish IRC users when UTF-8 got more popular. Since IRC networks generally didn't (and don't) have actual support for different encodings and mostly just deal with byte streams, this brought a lot of issues with Ä, Ö, Å, €, and some other more esoteric characters. Naturally a lot of ä and � abounded.
An interesting consequence was that channels that had non-ASCII characters in their names were split into two, since to the network they were different characters. I remember taking over a couple of channels by creating the UTF-8 versions of them and waiting for people to slowly migrate over.
Getting all of this to work correctly was quite difficult. With Irssi and similar terminal clients, you'd have to correctly configure not just the client but also screen, $TERM, locale, and your terminal. Even if you had a correctly configured UTF-8 client, you could still have problems. Since you can't tell 8-bit single-byte encodings apart other than by heuristics, typically you would have your client attempt to treat a message as UTF-8 and if it's invalid, use a fallback option like ISO-8859-15 (latin-9). But here's the fun thing about that: since IRC networks only deal with byte streams, they may truncate an UTF-8 message in the middle of a multibyte character. This would fail to be detected as valid UTF-8 and would use the fallback option, leading to mojibake for seemingly no reason.
All of this lead to quite some resistance to UTF-8 on the channels I was on. It was deemed the problems were bigger than the new possibilities. I mean, we could speak Finnish/English just fine and there was usually no need for any other languages. Eventually UTF-8 won, especially when mIRC released a version without an option to change the encoding.
- satyanash 5y ago> It was deemed the problems were bigger than the new possibilities. I mean, we could speak Finnish/English just fine and there was usually no need for any other languages. It also excluded a large part of the world from participating on IRC. Maybe if it was more proactive, IRC would have a larger role to play than it does now? Another example is punycode. unicode URLs are super unreadable, so no wonder the rest of the earth's population doesn't care enough about the open web, the importance of URLs vs Apps.
- Ndymium 5y ago> It also excluded a large part of the world from participating on IRC. Maybe if it was more proactive, IRC would have a larger role to play than it does now? I have to clarify that this was based on my experience in Finnish IRC channels. We spoke Finnish (and some English because English is everywhere) and we did not wish to bring any other languages into our channels as we wouldn't be able to speak Finnish then anymore. The character set issues were really just about our own special characters and ISO-8859-1 vs ISO-8859-15 vs UTF-8 users. Obviously character set issues probably did discourage some people from using IRC but I doubt it had anything to do with Finnish channels specifically. In the end, I think IRC was just overtaken by more convenient and featureful technologies (not to say that IRC is dead, but it's far from what it used to be). Punycode is another one of those unfortunate things we have to have to deal with due to things like homograph attacks (apple.com vs аpple.com).
- wink 5y agoI remember this as well on IRCNet on a few German channels. Basically mostly it was decided that everyone had to configure ISO-8859-1 (or ascii) or be kicked, and at some point the majority of ops then decided that now UTF-8 was correct. It didn't feel great a lot of the time, but to be fair those were communities governed by some people and the barrier to entry was configuring your client correctly. I might be misremembering but most bigger channels kinda agreed on the timeline, so they all switched to UTF-8 around the same time, so it kinda worked.
- kergonath 5y agoThe very same thing happened in French-speaking channels.
- distances 5y agoOur still-alive IRC channel never migrated. You still need to enter \xE4 for the join command to get the correct ISO-8859-1 channel. I think the stream of unintentional visitors stopped around the UTF-8 migration, though that could've also been effect of the decline of IRC use in general public.
- anthk 5y ago>ISO-8859-15 Ditto in Spanish;, I still have issues at IRC-Hispano with some users as I have UTF-8 with everything.