On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 01:45:50PM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
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...
Sorry, that's stupid. I'm German and have no problems with different encodings. I was running mutt within an UTF-8 xterm for years, long before I was configuring the rest of my system for UTF-8.
A very large percentage of computer users use operating systems that are still not 100% Unicode functional, making their switching to any
Right, that's why I only had mutt running in UTF-8 not the whole system.
they are using. So you're making trouble for potentially a great many people.
Then they have to move forward. You certainly don't mean to write WWW pages in HTML 1.0 because there may still be enough users with outdated browsers, do you?
UTF-8 is not bleeding edge.
And on top of that, it’s good typography. Quotes have a history of “correct” usage starting LONG before someone decided to cut cornersand only have straight quotes available.Who cares? Everyone recognizes straight quotes for what they are, and
Those who care about typographie? I hate stupid developers who forget about charset problems forcing anyone to use ASCII. Ever tried to use UTF-8 in IRC or tried CDDB with a Japanese or German CD guessing the charset?
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,
Bullshit, this was only necessary because noone cared about encodings and fonts. 7bit charsets don't give you much characters. Now we can finally use it, so let's use it and forget about outdated software.
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
And Japanese still use the traditional writing and IIRC Taiwan as well.
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...
Nope, not at all.
Another common Microsoft (or just any webmail) brain-death is mislabeling virtually every encoding as us-ascii. A lot of
Then those software must be fixed. As allways this works best if you cause annoyance because then people start complaining. Some companies only fix bugs if users are complaining.
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
Strange, I don't know anybody with this problems. Okay, they have not all fonts installed (not everyone likes to see his Chinese, Russian or Arabic spam displayed correctly ;-), but they have no problems with UTF-8.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
Just because some people are using outdated software, doesn't mean you should not use the abilities of modern systems.
Shade and sweet water!
Stephan
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