Text 25249, 53 rader
Skriven 2015-03-23 12:49:51 av mark lewis (1:3634/12.0)
  Kommentar till text 25231 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: defenseOfPublishers 404
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 On Mon, 23 Mar 2015, MICHAEL LOO wrote to MARK LEWIS:

 DD> I've been fussing with the code pages on Janis' BBS trying to come 
 DD> up with something acceptable. I didn't see an option for ASCII - 
 DD> which would be ideal.

 ml> CP437 is probably going to be your best bet if it is offered... 
 ml> the problem, though, is that you are trying to use ""high ascii"" 
 ml> characters at times (degree symbol) and those are going to be 
 ml> remapped to something less then 127... the only way around that is 
 ml> UTF-8 but then you're talking about multi-byte characters better 
 ml> known as glyphs... anything above 127 will appear as two 
 ml> characters and non-UTF-8 software will show them as those two 
 ml> characters instead of the single desired glyph... oh, and UTF-8 
 ml> might even use up to 4 bytes (characters) for one glyph... 

 MLoo>  

that's an "HTML entity"... i've seen those mime encoded, too... they have to go
through a double decode process... one to demime and the other to display the
desired character... even worse are those that go through even more layers of
encoding...

 ml> apostrophies and quotes being remapped is a pain... blame the 
 ml> typesetters and publishers for that mess... over all, anything not 
 ml> a control code and less than 127 will be OK... this is one reason 
 ml> why i don't even try to mess with ""high ascii"" characters other 
 ml> than the frame characters used for drawing boxes... 250F or 100C 
 ml> works just fine in 99% of the cases and saves a lot of heartache 
 ml> and hair loss ;)

 MLoo> But these people have to deal with more characters than regular 
 MLoo> (or even irregular) ASCII can accommodate. For quote marks 
 MLoo> alone, we have already there in ASCII:

right but who really needs a (eg) double quote that looks like two apostrophies
flipped upside down?? that's nothing more than ""pretty for pretty's sake""...

 MLoo> I'd rather blame the people who figured that 128 characters were 
 MLoo> all you'd ever need.

one has to remember where all of this stuff started... with limited memory, the
first step was all capitals and some punctuation...

 MLoo> Same with the people who wanted to add area code overlays rather 
 MLoo> than add a digit or two to the 7-digit phone numbers.

yep... and both bring their own sets of problems... lesser of two evils type
thing...

)\/(ark

 * Origin:  (1:3634/12)