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Internet Messages have been ASCII since Internet Messages.
by tosti 2mo ago
Internet Messages have been ASCII since Internet Messages.
- jcranmer 2mo agoMost internet protocols these days have shifted to UTF-8.
- tosti 2mo agoPerhaps so, and that's a good development imho. However, the most notorious of all, HTTP, has not afaik. Different encodings have been suggested including UTF-8. I'm not entirely sure why those proposals weren't implemented, but the dot-com bubble at the time might've had something to do with it.
- josephg 2mo agoTrue, but humans have been speaking non English languages since humans.
- tosti 2mo agoThe first networked computers predate unicode by several decades. Back then, the word length could be 8 but not neccesarily. All sorts of different encodings existed and a given common standard wasn't yet agreed upon It's not like internet standards don't know there are other languages, it's just that they documented how things were done at the time. Some legacy has remained ever since.
- josephg 2mo agoSure, but most code doesn't interact with raw packets. Legacy, ascii-only internet standards probably make up much less than 1% of new lines of code written today. Programming languages should support this use case. But not at the expense of the other 99% of software. Unicode-aware strings are the right choice for 99% of code. The last 1% should be a special case.
- tosti 2mo agoRaw packets? Legacy? Have you've ever talked to anything over a socket? You don't need a raw socket to get into trouble. You also don't need a "legacy" protocol.
- josephg 2mo agoYes, plenty of times. But I’m usually using raw byte arrays via protobuf or something similar. ASCII only text protocols are rare. Most devs don’t reimplement them from scratch. I’d wager most code is application code, where UTF8 strings are a great choice.