Text 6567, 60 rader
Skriven 2013-02-18 15:26:52 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Kees van Eeten (2:280/5003.4)
Ärende: LOL!
============
Hello Kees,

On Sunday February 17 2013 17:26, you wrote to Bj÷rn Felten:

 KE>  The Heder and the message body are two separate parts.

If one chooses to look at it that way. Header and message body are both part of
the message.

 KE>  If you search for messages by author, or build an index of messages.
 KE> You only read the structured header. There is no way to know what
 KE> codepage could have been used.

If one only reads the header, there is indeed no way to know what the encoding
is. But to build an index or make a search, one does not gave to know the
encoding. Just treat it as binary. One only needs to know the encoding when
displaying tekst.

 KE> Searching for names written with different codepages is at least a
 KE> challenge.

Yes, it is. The rest of the on-line world has taken the challenge. No reason
for Fiondet to stay behind.

 KE>  If ther is no consensus on what codepage is used for the text in
 KE> headers,

The only thing that makes sense is to use the same encoding as in the message
body.

 KE>  then 8 bit characters should not be used.

When I was young I had ideas about how the world should look like. When I grew
older I found out that the world has some ideas of its own that seldom coincide
with mine.

When I was young and was faced with the burden of learning other languages than
my own, I considered all these languages a terrible waste of resources. There
are just too many, there is no way that one can learn them all. Why can't we
agree on ONE language that we all learn and tear down the Tower of Babel? After
all, language is just a tool. I still think it is a good idea, but I know it is
not going to happen...

When I got my own computer and started using it for writing text, my father
asked me if he could use it to write something. His text contained an e with
accent. This was before the IBM PC. My printer could print an e with accent,
but I needed to do some programming to get the right code sent to it. That was
when I was confronted with the need for more than ASCII.

I then figured it would be a good idea to ge rid of all the "funny" characters
and devise transliteration schemes - like they have in German - for all
languages, so that we could avoid all the code page mess that we are in now.
Well... it didn't happen. The world insist on all those "funny" characters.
resistance is futile...


Cheers, Michiel

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