The Astronomer's Telegram is now being distributed through a variety of electronic mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms require specifying a character encoding to correctly interpret the data. To the present time, ATel has merely stated UTF-8 is the character set in use, without enforcement. We have found that this can cause unpredictable behavior by applications using ATel streams, such as those which read ATel through RSS feeds. For example, it appears some RSS readers will not read any of the items in the feed if characters are included which do not comply with UTF-8. We have had complaints about the inability of standard readers to read the entire ATel stream under these conditions.

We therefore are planning to change to strict enforcement of UTF-8 for all submitted material. This includes email addresses, author lists, subjects, and texts of posted ATels. We plan to make this change on about September 1 2010.

Based on past usage of ATel, we believe this will not significantly hinder our authors. However, we wish to hear from authors for whom this presents a hardship, so that we may consider alternate proposals. Please email the editors with a description of the hardship it would present and, most importantly, propose an alternate character encoding. Please note that UTF-8 offers the advantage of being compatible with every character in the Unicode character set, and is backwards compatible with ASCII; we would regard proposed other standard character encodings which perform both these advantages plus an additional advantage as superior to the UTF-8 encoding.