On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 01:06:38PM -0400, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > Heh, much to the detriment? Meh. It's nice to speak English, isn't it? You can just disregard everyone else's encoding difficulties, blissfully ignorant of the hastle that you cause... > I’m encouraging those who use good mail clients (like mutt) to set > them up in a UTF-8-using way! :) A very large percentage of computer users use operating systems that are still not 100% Unicode functional, making their switching to any Unicode locale problematical at best, or very likely entirely impossible. A great many of those have little or no control over what they are using. So you're making trouble for potentially a great many people. > And on top of that, it’s good typography. Quotes have a history of > “correct” usage starting LONG before someone decided to cut corners > and only have straight quotes available. Who cares? Everyone recognizes straight quotes for what they are, and they cause no one problems that I have ever heard about. Curly quotes do. Languages evolve and change, and computers have made the straight quote ubiquitous over the last 40 years. It's like you're Lady Jane, demanding that the value of a quid return to some historic pre-inflation value... The Chinese used the same complicated characters for thousands of years, and then scholars decided to simplify them to make things easier for the masses. Straight quotes are an example of the same impetus in action, albeit with a vastly smaller impact. > Technology has finally gotten around to providing some of the more > basic features of the Gutenberg printing press. I think this is a > great thing. I think you mean obscure and obsolete... > >[How does one even generate these characters on a Unix system, > >aside from copy-pasting them from some other source?] > > There’s a terrific little vim extension called UniCycle that does it: > http://jason.diamond.name/weblog/2005/10/20/unicycle-script-for-vim Thanks (sincerely) for the info. This might turn out to be useful to me for very different reasons than what we're discussing now... > >Even better, some Windows applications use this encoding and > >incorrectly label the resulting data as iso-8859-1. Extremely > >annoying. > > Eh, add a “charset-hook iso-8859-1 windows-1252” to your muttrc and > breathe deeply of the peace of mind. Which only works if your system actually knows aobut that character set. Lots and lots of Unix systems do not. IIRC even older Windows systems don't, and DOS definitely doesn't. All of these are still in surprisingly wide use, believe it or not. Another common Microsoft (or just any webmail) brain-death is mislabeling virtually every encoding as us-ascii. A lot of non-English speaking people already have to use Mutt's charset hooks just to get their own language displayed properly, so this trick won't work for them... > mutt user complaining that email isn’t all 78-column US-ASCII text > anymore seems… like complaining that a show you want to watch isn’t > on any of your local UHF/VHF stations when you have a perfectly > functional satellite dish in the back yard. I have to pay for the satellite dish... Everything comes with a price. I use UTF-8, so your choice of encoding does not any longer annoy me, other than philisophically; however I know a lot of people who are not native English speakers, and have to deal with this problem all the time. It sucks for them, and I sympathize. It's been brought up twice in the last month; that should make it clear that you are, in fact, causing difficulties for people. For every person who speaks up, how many do not? Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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