Statement of intent regarding document encodings

[Philip Linde]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020 12:47:07 -0400
"Drew DeVault" <sir at cmpwn.com> wrote:

> With respect to the charset parameter of the document mimetype for
> text/gemini documents, it is our intention to ONLY support UTF-8, and to
> raise an error if any other content encoding is specified.

I have opted to only support UTF-8 in my client, as well. This is
allowed by the spec. I'm not sure that I've ever come across a document
in Gemini space that uses a different encoding.

Allowing alternative encodings is a shortcoming of the spec IMO. If you
want to serve old documents, you can transcode them in advance. If your
client needs to render to a device that only supports some
non-utf8/ascii encoding (say, an old terminal), let it do the
transcoding from UTF-8 to its preferred encoding rather than burdening
every other client author with that problem.

-- 
Philip
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