Text 3588, 76 rader
Skriven 2009-10-27 00:40:48 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: Charset
===============
Hello Dale,

On Sunday October 25 2009 23:18, you wrote to me:

 DS>> What my system uses is CP437,

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

 DS> I looked at the documentation for the programs used by my BBS system.
 DS> I could not find any place where I could cause it to insert any
 DS> kludges (other than the standard MSGID, PATH, SEEN-BY).  I'm using
 DS> Maximus with Squish.

I wonder why you do not use a sysop editor to access your message base. Other
than that: your software appears to be a bit behind the times...

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

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

 DS> Then what is *the* standard -- or is it that there is no standard?

There is no universally accepted standard for characters outside the ASCII
range . As I wrote before at  one time there were attempts to declare the
original IBM PC character set the standard but that failed because of
opposition from those not using IBM PC clones. FidoNet never was an IBM PC only
network. The Atari comes to mind.

So if no kludge indicating the character set is present, one does not know what
character ancoding is used for characters outside the ASCII range. No CHRS
kludge signals "ASCII only".

 DS> All I know is that what I use works for me and for most of the people
 DS> I care to communicate with, and that has been the case for the past 15
 DS> years more or less.  I'm not interested in seeing the situation change
 DS> for me.

I can see why it works for you and why you are not (yet?) interested in
changing. American English is your native language and presumably you seldom or
never write in any language that has characters not in codepage 437. I suspect
you very seldom write in any other language than your native language. For you
2x26 letters, ten digits and a handful of other characters are enough.

Not so for the rest of the world. We Europeans with our multitude of languages,
have been wrestling with character sets way before the birth of FidoNet. In the
eraly 80ties, we had this system called viewdate. The French called it minitel.
A dial up system using terminals with a 40x24 16 color screen. It has a
character set based on ASCII. It also had graphic characters, similar to those
in the IBM set. Much of the bit space went into the colour codes, so it all was
pretty limited. Even then there was the problem of umlauts and accents, with
the result that there were several code positions reserved for national
variants.

Even in 1980 it was clear that all efforts to force the world into 7 bits ASCII
were doomed to fail. Even the might of Microsoft could not accomplish that.

With VGA came the codepages, which was tacit admission that 8 bits is not
enough either.

 DS> I'm not the one who made the assumption.  I know what my messages look
 DS> like, and what coding set is used.  You are the one who made the
 DS> assumption that I could not read or produce characters outside the 7
 DS> bit ASCII set -- in spite of the evidence in my messages that I could.

No, I made no such assumption. I made the OBSERVATION that your messages do not
have a CHRS kludge. I made the observation that your signal to the world that
you do not support anything but plain ASCII. It is not my fault that yo emit a
false signal.


Cheers, Michiel

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