Why Nothing Ever Goes Away

[Richard Wordingham]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2015 15:57:37 +0200
Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> My opinion of UTF-7 is that
> it was just a temporary and experimental solution to help system
> admins and developers adopt the new UCS, including for their old
> 7-bit environments.

If you have a human controlling the interpretation, UTF-7 was a good
way of avoiding data being mangled by interfaces that insisted that
unlabelled (indeed, sometimes, unlabellable) 8-bit text was UTF-8 or
conversely, Latin-1 or code page 1252.  The old Yahoo groups web
interface for senders was pretty much restricted to 8-bit ISO-2022
encodings without it.  C1 characters would be converted to Latin-1 on
the assumption that they were Windows 1252.  Browsers dropping UTF-7
support was a major inconvenience.

Richard.