Is it time to adopt the UTF-8 character set for the Digest? [nfp]

I and the other members of the Telecom Digest staff have been talking about switching from the ISO-8859-1 character set to the UTF-8 set.

Here's why I think it's time to make the switch:

  1. Almost all posts which are composed in Mail/News clients are using UTF-8 now.

  1. AFAICT, all posts from Google Groups are arriving in UTF-8 format.

  2. ISO-8859-1 is rare now: I haven't seen it on any websites for a year or two.

  1. The ISO-8859-1 character set does not contain a full complement of international characters.

  2. Converting accented characters from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 is a /very/ time-consuming manual effort, complicated by the fact that the emacs editor I employ to approve posts uses UTF-8 as its "native" character set. What I once thought would be a simple delete-and-insert job to substitute ISO-8859-1 values for accented characters and special symbols is often a convoluted effort that requires me to type entire sentences or even paragraphs over, by hand, to avoid unwanted extra characters that somehow cling to the existing text without showing in emacs. (If you know *why*, PLEASE share that info!)

  1. There are online character-set conversion sites I'm able to use /sometimes/ - but they don't handle all character sets, and text which has been pasted into a post from a commercial word-processing program can have proprietary character sets that require specialized conversion software I don't have, and even more time, which I don't have either.

However, I do not know how many newsreaders or other software still use ISO-8859-1, and that's why I'm asking your opinions. If you cannot write or read posts which are composed using UTF-8, I want to know about that. You'll need to modify the Digest's address in an obvious way in order to reply.

N.B. The subject line of this post is marked with the "[nfp]" glyph, which means your replies are Not For Publication.

Bill

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