Re: Revision of UTF-8 history in draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-05.txt

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Followup to:  <E37E01957949D611A4C30008C7E691E2E64B42@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
By author:    "Hart, Edwin F." <Edwin.Hart@xxxxxxxxxx>
In newsgroup: linux.utf8
>
> I'd like to make an observation.  According to Markus Kuhn, Ken Thompson
> designed UTF-8.  This is not quite true.  Ken Thompson (according to Markus)
> designed FSS-UTF.  Although, the 10646 Working Group based the design of
> UTF-8 on FSS-UTF, UTF-8 and FSS-UTF are very similar but not the same.
> 
> As I recall, the ISO/IEC 10646 Working Group was aware of the X-Open,
> FSS-UTF.  UTF-8 is a variation of FSS-UTF but not the exact algorithm of
> FSS-UTF.  UTF-8 accounted for the surrogates of UTF-16 by forcing a
> conversion of any text encoded with UTF-16 to UCS-4 (32-bit form) and then
> converting text encoded in UCS-4 to UTF-8.  This modification made it
> illegal to convert the 1024 surrogate code points of 10646/Unicode to UTF-8.
> Part of the confusion today is that some vendors implemented FSS-UTF but
> called it UTF-8.  UTF-8 is not FSS-UTF.  and FSS-UTF is not UTF-8.
> 

There is no difference.  This is just codifying the braindamage of
UTF-16 and its impact on other encoding form, in particular making it
clear that surrogates are not to be recursively encoded.

	-hpa
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