FreeDesktop.org has started a new project for evangelizing and documenting proper Unicode support in free software. It’s called Project UTF-8.

From the Project UTF-8 website:

Project UTF-8, is a project for evangelization and documentation of proper Unicode (and most specifically UTF-8) support in free and Open Source software.

The latest specification for UTF-8 (dated November 2003) can be found as IETF’s STD 63 or RFC 3629, available from http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3629.html.

Contrary to what Markus Kuhn is doing with his UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, we will be trying to maintain a list of software that doesn’t support UTF-8. Since UTF-8 is the character set standard, we consider every software the doesn’t support UTF-8 to be very old-fashioned and out of date.

IRC discussions happen frequently on irc.gnome.org, on the #unicode channel.

Midgard supports UTF-8 through the “russian” parser, but maybe it would be the time to make UTF-8 the default character encoding in whole Midgard. I wonder about migrating old data, though.