On: Technologies I thought my son would never use

[rusk]

Nope. If you read an ASCII file with control characters in Java you’ll get an exception. Also it won’t work with the 8-bit ASCII variants. Neither are “true Scotsmen” of course, but the point still stands that HTML could yet be more durable.

[chubot → rusk]

I think you’re confusing Unicode and utf8. java uses Unicode but not utf8; it uses a 2 byte encoding with surrogate pairs by default.

ASCII is utf8, but it’s not utf16. ASCII will be around for as long as utf8 is.

[rusk → chubot]

I’m almost certain the default encoding for reading/writing files in Java is UTF-8 and similarly for the source files. I don’t think I encounter wide char data much really at all day to day ...