Feedback on the proposal to change U+FFFD generation when decoding ill-formed UTF-8

[Alastair Houghton via Unicode]

On 15 May 2017, at 23:43, Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> The problem with surrogates is inadequate testing.  They're sufficiently
> rare for many users that it may be a long time before an error is
> discovered.  It's not always obvious that code is designed for UCS-2
> rather than UTF-16.

While I don’t think we should spend too long debating the relative merits of UTF-8 versus UTF-16, I’ll note that that argument applies equally to both combining characters and indeed the underlying UTF-8 encoding in the first place, and that mistakes in handling both are not exactly uncommon.  There are advantages to UTF-8 and advantages to UTF-16.

Kind regards,

Alastair.

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