Text 3578, 78 rader
Skriven 2009-10-26 00:12:08 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
   Kommentar till text 3570 av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: Charset
===============
Hello Dale,

On Saturday October 24 2009 23:11, you wrote to me:

 DS> Well, at least you got his name right this time.

I had it "right" all the time. "Right" in th sense that my character encoding
method always was in accord with the CHRS kludge.

 DS> And when I read his message, there were no problems with either the
 DS> header or the text body

That is because I switched back to codepage 850 which is the same as your
codepage 437 for the characters that were in the message.

 DS>  (which did not contain any characters outside of the normal
 DS> keyboard).

Define "normal keyboard".

 MVDV>> Anyway, if the header turned out right on your screen that
 MVDV>> was pure luck. Your messages do not display a CHRS kludge.

 DS> What my system uses is CP437,

If you do not advertise that with a CHRS kludge, there is no way for the reader
to know that.

 DS> which has been the defacto standard for my DOS work for years.

That may be what you use, but is it NOT the de facto standard for FidoNet
messaging.

 DS> He had the kludge of UTF-8 on his message, but it read just fine on my
 DS> system.

Two wrongs that happen to make a right in this case. Both your systems do not
properly handle the UTF-8  kludge for the header.

 MVDV>> Which means that you do not support anything other than the
 MVDV>> basic US ASCII set AKA ANSI X3.4. Your messages do not
 MVDV>> indicate any support of 8 bits characters at all.

 DS> See above.  You are making assumptions without any evidence.  Your
 DS> assumption is once again false.

No, YOU are the one making the assumption: that no CHRS kludge implies CP437.
That assumption is false. The absence of a CHRS kludge means that any
assumption about characters outside the 7 bis ASCII set is ... eh.. an
assumption. The only safe assumption in that case is no support for characters
outside the ASCII range.

 MVDV>> And then the Russians came...

 MVDV>> Codepage 866 is the most used character encoding scheme for
 MVDV>> FidoNet these  days. You may want to resist that change, but I
 MVDV>> am afraid that resistance is futile...

 DS> It may be the most used, but only in that part of Fidonet that has a
 DS> need for Cyrillic. The rest of us prefer to use CP437 or some variant
 DS> of that.

Hardly. Latin-1 is quit popular among the *nix crowd. For the Euro zone there
is Latin-9, the only 8 bits set that - other than the Windows character set
supports the Euro sign. How would you feel about a character set that does not
include the Dollar sign?

CP437 is antique. Speaking about antique: here is an interesting article by a
fellow we all know at least bt name: http://wps.com/projects/codes/index.html

And if you want to know more about character code issues, here is some more
interesting reading: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html


Cheers, Michiel

--- Golded+Irex+InterMail
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