On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 09:33:49PM +0200, Stephan Seitz wrote: > 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. Sorry, you are uninformed. Try reading German e-mail with euc-kr or euc-jp, or pratcically any encoding that does not use latin characters. It's impossible (or at least rather difficult), because many of the characters (such as the German double-s, or any characters with umlauts) simply don't exist in those character sets. They generally contain only their own glyphs, plus the 127 original ASCII characters. Yes, Unicode fixes this problem. But probably half the people in Korea use the Internet in a PC room, where they can only use whatever is available. Windows XP is becoming more prevalent, but still a very high percentage of these machines are running Windows 98. There is no Unicode on these systems. Users of university computer systems who only have access to e-mail through their university's computers (possibly because they can't afford to buy their own computer) may be using mutt on a circa-1990's Unix server. There are plenty such systems still in service, and they don't have Unicode support. At work I support a very large number of machines running Debian Linux. Have a look: [demartin@sanitized demartin] $ locale -a |grep -i utf [demartin@sanitized demartin] Just because the operating system supports UTF, doesn't mean the support is installed. The users of such systems generally have no control over this. So, sorry for being stupid, but just because things are happy in your own little world doesn't mean they work anywhere else... > >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 pages in HTML 1.0 because there may still be enough users with outdated 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? It's not always in the users' control. See above. > UTF-8 is not bleeding edge. Regardless, it's still widely unavailable. > >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. So? Just because a large group of people have not adopted an improvement does not mean it isn't an improvement... > >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. Good luck. Let us know how you make out with that... > As allways this works best if you cause annoyance because then > people start complaining. Some companies only fix bugs if users are > complaining. Conveniently for Microsoft, they have an effective monopoly on the desktop. Since most computer users are using the same broken software, it more-or-less works for them (or Microsoft tells them to upgrade to Windows XP). It's the rest of the computer-using world that has the problem, and Microsoft doesn't care one iota aobut them... > >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. It does mean that, if you can communicate just as effectively without using them, but using them excludes people unfairly. This is exactly such a case. -- 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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