2000.01.19 12:26 "Unicode build of libtiff?", by Dirk Haun

2000.01.24 10:50 "RE: Unicode build of libtiff?", by John Aldridge

Indeed UTF-8 is only compatible with ASCII, but would that make it unwise to say that the type formerly known as ASCII has been redefined to be UTF-8?

I didn't say or imply this. When I wrote

>> Not so! UTF-8 is different for characters >127...

I was responding to the specific claim

>> > Nope! UTF-8 encoding is the same as ASCII for all values
>> ><=255, so all Roman/Latin based language information would look and
>> >act the same.

which is wrong.

How would this break anything other than to have non-savvy apps display gibberish where they wouldn't have been able to display anything anyway?

Since you ask, however, I suppose it's possible that "common practice" is to store characters encoded according to the current locale in these fields. This would result in, e.g., Greek TIFF files being illegible to Japanese readers; but this might have been an acceptable limitation in specific markets. The spec prohibits this ("8-bit byte that contains a 7-bit ASCII code"), but it might work in practice.

Does anyone know whether this practice is used, and if so whether it is common enough to worry about?

Cheers,
John