On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 06:30:46PM -0400, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Monday, May 1 at 01:45 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
> > 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...
>
> And you know what else, using complicated words like "blissfully" and
> "ignorant" can also be confusing to people who don't speak English
> very well (heck, using English at all is confusing to people who don't
> speak English).
Sure, but that problem can be solved rather easily with a dictionary.
Displaying characters which your system does not support has no
solution at all (except perhaps get a new system or upgrade your
current system -- which is not a practical solution). There's no
comparison.
> Encoding "hassles" have been a problem since the dawn of the
> internet (and even a little before that). Unicode is the *solution*
> to the hassles, and the sooner people can be convinced to start
> using it, the better it is for all concerned.
I would agree, if Unicode were universally available. I do, after
all, use it myself for that very reason. However, the fact is it is
not universally available. For example, probably about half of the
people I communicate with in Korea can not read my Korean e-mail
unless I am careful to encode it in EUC-KR, because their systems
don't support Unicode, and they generally have no control over that,
since they largely do not own (at least one of) the machines they use
regularly.
I know people living in America who speak Korean or Japanese, and can
not read either when they are at work/school because their IT
department doesn't install the support for those languages (that's a
different problem, but the point still stands)... They aren't in
control, and they are disabled because of it.
> >> 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.
>
> The text I write is not unintelligible. The complaints have been along
> the lines of "why am I getting ??? in my emails where the quotes
> should be?" ; forgive me, but this hardly seems like a huge problem
> for people trying to read it who are unable to use software that
> supports Unicode characters. At best, it's a subtle prod for that user
> to learn to configure their system in a more modern way, and at worst
> it gives the impression that I have a question when I do not.
As a former ESL teacher, and a student of foreign languages myself, I
can tell you that's probably wrong. The question marks appear in
places where they are not contextually appropriate, which leaves a
relatively inexperienced non-native speaker wondering what should
actually be there (especially since the quotes are normally only one
glyph, and there are multiple question marks), or if they are just
seeing some syntactic usage they haven't learned yet. It's very
likely to make such people initially confused, if not completely
unable to understand what you've written.
There are probably such people on this list.
> Let's keep in mind that for mutt users (which, given the name of this
> list, should be most people who actually read the email) who are
> forced to use computer systems that do not support modern character
> sets, this is a matter of simply adding "//TRANSLIT" to the end of
> their $charset setting.
Yup. It's easy, if you know about that setting, and you know what's
going on. The problem is that knowing those things is very difficult,
as I think has been proven out on this list. The first few times I
came across that problem, I had no idea what the problem was... and I
had been managing computers professionally for over 6 years at the
time, and using them for about 15. It's highly improbable that a
newbie would have even the slightest clue about what the problem is,
how to fix it, or where to look. Remember, a lot of people who use
mutt do so by accident, e.g. users at universities. They may not know
about the mutt mailing list at all, or other forms of help which might
be available to them.
> > 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.
>
> The reason the Chinese simplified their character set was because the
> masses could not understand it (you had to have years of training to
> begin to recognize them all). The same is not true of curly quotes.
Regardless, straight quotes was a simplification of curly quotes to
save a few characters in a very limited number of available slots.
The REASONS for the simplification are different, but the fact remains
that it is a valid simplification, no information is lost to the
reader, and there's no good practical reason why curly quotes are
needed instead. Both reasons for simplification are practical
reasons, and neither is less valid than the other. Not to mention
that in written English, straight quotes have been the norm for
eternity... [No, not literally...]
Since their availability on even modern computers is in fact quite
limited even today, my contention is that curly quotes should be
avoided in electronic communications. It's a matter of practicality,
and of consideration for one's fellow computer users. By contrast,
the only argument for using curly quotes is aesthetics. Not a winning
argument, as far as I can see...
> >> 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...
>
> Unicode is hardly obscure or obsolete.
I was refering to the Gutenberg printing press and its features...
[...]
> For example, compound hooks (hooks that create hooks) can be used to
> get the charset to display properly as long as there is something
> else in the headers (such as a User-Agent or a From header) that can
> be used to distinguish senders who do not encode their email
> correctly.
If a user's mailer doesn't encode the mail correctly, how can you
reliably determine what the correct encoding should be? You can
assume that it is the user's own language, but that assumption may
well be wrong. Only in America and a few other countries is it common
for well-educated people to speak only one language, so odds are they
may have use to communicate with other people in a language other than
their own. This is a huge problem.
> > 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?
>
> This is a good argument.
>
> An even better argument to make would be to say that mutt-users is, to
> a large extent, a mailing list for people who are having trouble with
> their email. As such, emails to this list should be in a form that has
> the greatest probability of working (or at least, being readable) by
> people with broken email readers. While a somewhat less-broken setup
> may merely replace the curly quotes with ???, a very broken setup may
> refuse to display the email at all.
>
> And I agree, which is why this, and all future emails from me to this
> list, will be in 7-bit us-ascii.
Then, all my ranting is not for naught. ;-)
> I still think that, given the opportunity, people should take the time
> to support and use Unicode, and that using it in general will prompt
> more widespread adoption of that solution.
I also agree. But hopefully I have convinced you that it is not that
simple...
> P.S. If you have problems with modern encodings, why do you use
> PGP/MIME? Pine users, for example cannot use that form of signature
> without a great amount of trouble, nor can many people who use much
> older mailers that do not support MIME encoding of any sort.
First, I do not have any problems with modern encodings. My complaint
here is that you are intentionally using characters which are only
available in a very small subset of the available encodings, and a
large percentage of people on mailing lists such as this one are not
using those encodings, nor can they.
I /was/ going to say this:
As a matter of fact, I ONLY use PGP-MIME on this list. If you can
find my posts on other lists, you'll see that I use traditional
PGP, for precisely that reason.
However, being cautious to check before I made such a claim, it seems
that I have been very lax in maintaining my mutt configuration, and
this hasn't been true for some time. It will be rectified next chance
I get to fiddle with my mutt config.
Thanks for calling my attention to it.
OTOH, I know for a fact that virtually everyone I communicate with via
encrypted/signed e-mail can handle PGP-MIME (the few who can't have
send-hooks to fix it), and I don't really care if random people on a
mailing list are able to authenticate my e-mail via PGP -- that in no
way makes it hard for them to understand what I've said in my e-mail.
And they still can verify it, if they really care to, though I admit
it is rather painful to do manually, but that is no concern of mine.
It's not at all the same as making parts of the message uninteligible.
So, maybe I won't bother to fix it, at least until/unless someone has
a legitimate need to authenticate my e-mail and can't because of this...
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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