Whoa. UTF-8 is older now than ASCII was when UTF-8 was invented.

[root42@chaos.social]

@tek This! UTF-8 is a great encoding. Unicode can be a mess at times though.

[debaer@23.social]

@tek But UTF-EBCDIC is still younger than EBCDIC was when UTF-EBCDIC was invented.

[djl@mastodon.mit.edu]

@vathpela @tek

Nah. It stopped sucking when Unicode became variable-width even in a 32-bit encoding. Or at least it no longer became valid to correctly point out that it sucks, since there now isn't anything that doesn't.

[ahltorp@mastodon.nu]

@mxk @vathpela @tek I don’t know any way to run telnet over a non-checksummed connection.

[timwardcam@c.im]

@tek Every now and then the Cambridge CST exam papers include a question like "explain why even experienced programmers sometimes have problems with character codes".

You could write pretty well anything you liked.

Originally what was expected was an essay about things like escape sequences on Flexowriter tapes; in my day it was about conversion between EBCDIC and ASCII; these days it might be about obscure characters in URLs.

[mansr@society.oftrolls.com]

@mo @vathpela @tek Variable length encoding adds a little complexity at the input and output stages, but I think the benefits outweigh that, especially the 8-bit compatibility that allows a lot of software to work (at least to some extent) unmodified.

[jaddle@toot.community]

@tek
And yet, my bank still won't let me add a contact (for etransfers) with an accent in their name.

[enno@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@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.

[alper@rls.social]

@tek MySQL will still happily mangle it.

[loke@functional.cafe]

@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.

[vathpela@infosec.exchange]

@glent @ahltorp @mxk @tek do y'all just not believe people still have to deal with actual UARTs, or what?

[mxk@hachyderm.io]

@vathpela @glent @ahltorp @tek I do work with actual uarts but only for debugging purposes as a fallback when ssh fails.
That doesn't stop me from considering using utf-8 a net benefit.

[ahltorp@mastodon.nu]

@vathpela @glent @mxk But even if it’s raw UART with no layer in between, it’s no more of a problem than with Ascii or ISO 8859, if you don’t count the larger surface area of a wide character, which is sort of unavoidable.

[vathpela@infosec.exchange]

@mxk @glent @ahltorp @tek I agree, but I also think it could and should have improved.

[vathpela@infosec.exchange]

@ahltorp @glent @mxk we could have made the whole situation better, but we didn't.