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Comment by Tiksi | Hacker News Reader

ANSI must be the default and only encoding. Why does anything else still exist?

Because, you see, not everyone in the world uses Latin characters. UTF-8 must become a new standard instead of that whole obsolete encoding zoo.

And in 20-30 years we'll likely be saying the same about UTF-8.

I figured that "ANSI" would give away that I wasn't being serious since it's not actually an encoding.

> And in 20-30 years we'll likely be saying the same about UTF-8.

Well... If we will, why not? But the thing is that in 20-30 years we won't be able to invent any new writing systems that UTF-8 won't cover. Single-byte encodings were doomed because of their single-byteness. The same awaits two-byte encodings like UCS-2 (aka UTF-16BE) - we already have extended code points for something that glamour hipsters call "emoji". Variable-byte encoding will never become obsolete.

Unicode is currently limited to 21 bits for compatibility with UTF-16. Eventually we might manage to exhaust all available codepoint space, and with that we'd have to move to yet another encoding with a whole new kind of surrogate pairs. Though UTF-8 could originally handle 31 bits, that's no longer the case.

So I see 2 steps here: dropping UTF-16 altogether (well, already, because there are plenty of extended codepoints above 0xFFFF), and when approaching the 31-bit limit - inventing something like "zero-width codepoint joiner" to compose codes of arbitrary length.

For example, in a hypothetical alien language, a hypothetical character "rjou" would have a code 0x2300740457 (all the previous codes are exhausted). We can't express this with a single code, so actually we split it into 2-byte parts and write "#" (0x0023), joiner, "t" (0x0074), joiner and "ї" (cyrillic letter yi, 0x0457). As we have a joiner between these codes, we know that we must interpret and display them not as a "#tї" sequence but as a single alien "rjou" character. I think you get the idea.

> dropping UTF-16 altogether (well, already, because there are plenty of extended codepoints above 0xFFFF)

UTF-16 can handle stuff above U+FFFF just fine, it encodes that with surrogate pairs. Are you thinking about UCS-2?

The 21-bit limit for Unicode comes from the limits of UTF-16's surrogate pairs.

> But the thing is that in 20-30 years we won't be able to invent any new writing systems that UTF-8 won't cover.

I think you underestimate humanity's aptitude at creating things that don't fit into well defined standards.

My (admittedly poorly stated) point wasn't that we shouldn't be moving everything over to UTF-8. I personally use it wherever possible just because it makes life easier. My point was that there are decades of things that use ASCII-US or another one of the overlapping but incompatible encodings because they were the RightThing™ to use at the time and there's no way we're going to get rid of everything non-UTF-8 any time soon.

In 20-30 years we'll be saying "Why isn't everything in FutureText-64, it should be the only encoding. Why does anything else even exist?", and it'll be because we're saying the same about UTF-8 now.

I think you miss the point. When CP1251, KOI8-R and other crazy imcompatible things came around, they came around because there was a need: ASCII didn't provide a necessary character set. Now when we have Unicode that embodies virtually all character sets existing on Earth, we don't _really_ need either non-Unicode encodings, or even fixed-byte UTF versions. So a move to any hypothetical FutureText-64 will actually give no practical gain, unlike a move from single-byters to, for example, UCS-2 and then from UCS-2 to UTF-8.

But my main point is another: eliminate all single-byter and fixed-byter zoo and leave one universal encoding. When (if ever) it's time to replace it, we'll do it all and at once, not having those crazy iconvs everywhere.

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