Text 3548, 71 rader
Skriven 2009-10-23 11:12:18 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: Charset
===============
Hello Dale,

On Thursday October 22 2009 23:22, you wrote to me:

 MVDV>> Obviously your reader is not configured to properly display
 MVDV>> UFTF-8 encoded messages and it uses some default character set.

 DS> Of course -- It is a standard DOS based program.  It knows about the
 DS> ASCII character set -- which has been pretty much the standard thing
 DS> to use in Fido as far as I know of.

The days that Fidonet is ASCII only are long gone. The battle to restrict the
character set to ASCII and ASCII only was fought over fifteen years ago and
lost. The reality of today is that the majority of messages transported through
the FidoNet network are NOT written in ASCII. ASCII does not support the
Cyrillic character set.

 DS> IMO, UTF8 is for web pages, email and such programs.

UTF-8 is an encoding scheme for unicode which can be used anywhere where text
is processed.

I suggest the folowing for reading: http://czyborra.com/

 MVDV>> The reason I set UTF-8 encoding was to counter Björns
 MVDV>> claim that it is not possible to properly display the name
 MVDV>> in the header when using UTF-8. Björn's message that I
 MVDV>> responded to, was in UTF-8 and the header was in the
 MVDV>> default character set, not UTF-8.

 DS> I fail to understand why you would convert it from a coding where it
 DS> looked just fine to one where it was messed up.

It did NOT look fine. The third letter in Björn's first named appeared in
various shapes, many of them not even coming near an 'o' with dieresis.

The problem with 8 bit character sets - as Björn pointed out - is that one can
only display 256 different characters at the time. And that is just not enough
for today's need. There is no 8 bit character set that takes care of Cyrillic
AND the accented and umlauted characters used in many "Western" languages.

Extended good old ASCII with one extra bit to make 8 bit character sets was a
step taken only a few years after the introduction of ASCCI in the early
60ties. And it has been quit a mess...

The nest logical step is to break the 8 bit barrier and introduce a multi byte
character set, That was done in 1993 with the introduction of unicode. Many
have adopted it as a standard. The Unix community has. And since Windows 2000
even the pig headed at Microsoft have.

Why should FidoNet stay behind? UTF-8 is now used in Fidonet on an experimental
basis. Proposals have been launched and it is the FTSC's job to deal with those
proposals.

 MVDV>> Of course it does not look right on readers not equiped to
 MVDV>> handle UTF-8.

 DS> Can any DOS programs can handle that coding?

Why not? A byte oriented character encoding scheme - as UTF-8 is - is not bound
to any particular operating system.

I use the 32 bit Windows version of Golded and I taught it some tricks to deal
with UTF-8. I have not tries it, but there is no reason why the same trick
would not work on the DOS version of Golded.


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MINGW 1.1.5-b20070503
 * Origin: http://www.vlist.org (2:280/5555)