Text 6698, 103 rader
Skriven 2013-02-20 14:51:15 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av mark lewis (1:3634/12.42)
Ärende: LOL!
============
Hello mark,

On Tuesday February 19 2013 17:30, you wrote to me:

 MvdV>> As ASCII is a subset of UTF-8,

 ml> how can such a learned man as yourself get such basic things
 ml> incorrect?

It is not incorrect.

 ml> ASCII came before UTF-8... that makes UTF-8 a superset of ASCII

Yes, that too.

 ml>  instead of the other way around...

No. If A is a superset of B, then B is a subset of A. It does not matter what
came first, A or B. The moment they exist both, the relation goes both ways.

 ml> the way you state it above would have some thinking that ASCII came
 ml> after UTF-8...

That is only your warped way of thinking.

 ml> work on what has become unicode didn't start until 1987 and ASCII had
 ml> been used for years before then...

Still: After the introduction of Unicoe, ASCII is a subset of Unicode.

 MvdV>> there is no transition problem when moving from ASCII to UTF-8.
 MvdV>> Anyone wanting to use pure ASCII only can continue to do so
 MvdV>> forever.

 ml> agreed to a point... that point being until they come across a message
 ml> they used to be able to read with no problems

The ASCII only crowd could never read it anyway, so they don't have a problem
that they did not have before.

You are mixing up the ASCII only crowd with the CP437 only crowd. Yes, they
can't read anything not encoded in CPO437. well, they can't read most of the
non ASCII messages anyway, theyare in Cyrillic.

 ml> and now has ugly double character monstrosities where there used to
 ml> be legible single byte characters they could easily read...

Only when encoded in CP437. And no matter what you claim, CP437 is and never
was the default encoding for Fidonet. The only default character set for
Fidonet is ASCII. If they extended that default character set from ASCII to
CP437, it is their own mistake.

 ml>  björn's o umlate is a perfect example of this...

It is an example of a character that is covered by CP437. But even before
Fidonet expanded beyond Northern America, IBM and Microsoft realised that CP437
only would not do for all their customers rich enough to buy a personal
computer. So they made other code pages. And you know what? Cimputers sold with
a Microsoft OS, did not have CP437 as the pre-installed code page outside the
US and Canada.

 SD>>> I can say only one thing: please use the same charset as in body
 SD>>> (specified by CHRS) or use only ASCII letters. Anything other
 SD>>> renders automatic message processing impossible.

 KE>>  As others have recounted, the header should be in the default
 KE>> characterset of the network.

 MvdV>> That is not what FTS-0001 says...

 ml> what, exactly, does FTS-0001 say about character sets and message
 ml> headers??

Very little other than that the relevant fields contain null terminated
strings. It says nothing about a default character set. But it does mention
this:

    A language  specific  notation  was avoided.  Please help  stamp  out
    environmental  dependencies.   Only  you  can  prevent  PClone  market
    dominance.  Don't panic, there are rectangular record layouts too.

 MvdV>> Another error from the founding fathers. Time in the message
 MvdV>> header should have been in UTC, instead of local time. To
 MvdV>> correct that error, we are saddled with yet anoter kludge.

 ml> why should they have worried about that when they never expected the
 ml> network and technology to take off like it did?

There has always been a large overlap between the Fidonet community and the HAM
community. HAM's know that radio is not stopped by national bounderies and time
zones. So they use UTC (or GMT as it was called back then) when they make a
sched or write out a QSL card. The HAms were there first, the founding fathers
had plenty of opportunity to learn from the HAMs.

 ml>  not to mention that they had their own full-time jobs to deal with,
 ml> too...

That is no excuse for tunnel vision.

Cheers, Michiel

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