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Three month spec freeze

Sean Conner sean at conman.org

Wed Jun 3 17:14:49 BST 2020

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It was thus said that the Great Felix Queißner once stated:

It was thus said that the Great Felix Queißner once stated:

Secondly, Linux systems come with iconv. Not only is this a program, but

it's also a library which is dead simple to use as there are only three

functions:

Yeah, i know these bindings and i know that libiconv is a thing. It's

still a dependency that *all* Gemini programs need to incorporate to be

*fully* compliant for displaying text/gemini files

Yes, and because of the line breaking requirement of text/gemini, theUnicode Line Breaking Algorithm is *also* required---a nice document of20,000 words:

https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/

Your client does implement that, right? Also, what does your client do ifit receives a BOM (byte order mark)? That's illegal in UTF-8. Also, whatUnicode normalization forms does it support? What does it do when itencounters an illegal byte in the document?

Or does it pass everything along to the operating system?

RFC-1436 (the gopher RFC) suggests ISO Latin1 (ISO-8859-1 if I'm not

mistaken) for 8-bit character sets and says *nothing* about UTF-8 (of

course, it was written before UTF-8 was an RFC, three years later). But

most of the gopher sites I hit these days are UTF-8---it's rare that I

actually encounter anything but UTF-8.

So, what you are saying is:

Most people already use utf-8, so there's no reason to enforce utf-8?

Yes.

I think it's even more an argument to enforce UTF-8. It makes the

software way simpler and less error pronce, reducing the possibilities

of attacks via badly implemented encodings and also reduces the risk of

il-translated and badly displayed text.

I don't agree fully, given some of my questions above. Also, do youfilter out control sequences? MS-DOS supported control sequences toredefine the keyboard but I'm not sure if that is still the case withWindows.

-spc