ASCII-only ?

In article , Jacob navia
wrote:
[Mod. note: MIME damage approximately fixed. Please don't post using
non-ASCII characters, including, but not limited to, the e-acute in
\'ecrit -- mjh]

While I understand that USENET is traditionally an ASCII-only
format, is this convention being supported because it's a convention,
or because some machine critical to the moderation of the newsgroup is
incapable of handling the well-established techniques for handling
non-ASCII characters?
If the latter, is there a timetable for dragging this machinery
kicking and screaming into the 1990s?

Not picking on the moderator, but I'm wondering why this
situation persists, when the large majority of other newsgroups I've
encountered can handle perfectly well the inclusion of "degree" symbols
(as used in degree-minute-second latitudes and longitudes, surely
appropriate usage for an astronomical group ; my trip-up), or in this
case a person posting from France posting with the *correct* spelling
in boilerplate, which happens to require characters not in US-ASCII (as
defined in the mid 1950s, I think).

--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:38 +0100, but posted later.

(Moderation strategy isn't really on topic here, but I'll clarify...)

In article ,
Aidan Karley .group wrote:
While I understand that USENET is traditionally an ASCII-only
format, is this convention being supported because it's a convention,
or because some machine critical to the moderation of the newsgroup is
incapable of handling the well-established techniques for handling
non-ASCII characters?

Both. Usenet is still not completely 8-bit clean, and many standard
pieces of news-reading software won't handle 8-bit characters well, so
it's a good idea to stick to 7 bits: hence the convention.

But there's an additional problem: because the moderation works by
gatewaying the postings to e-mail, and then feeding them back into the
news stream, they pass through a number of machines that mangle them
in various ways: one fairly predictable way is that 8-bit messages
will be MIME-encoded. Usenet and MIME don't mix (again, many news
readers don't support it) and so your dedicated moderation team have
to remove the MIME by hand (if we have time) or post an article with
screwed-up formatting (if not).

Therefore, please post in plain ASCII only.

Martin
--
Martin Hardcastle
Moderator, sci.astro.research

"Aidan Karley" .
wrote:

Jacob navia wrote:

[Mod. note: MIME damage approximately fixed.
Please don't post using non-ASCII characters,
including, but not limited to, the e-acute in
\'ecrit -- mjh]

While I understand that USENET is traditionally an
ASCII-only format, is this convention being
supported because it's a convention, or because
some machine critical to the moderation of the
newsgroup is incapable of handling the
well-established techniques for handling non-ASCII
characters?

There may be a problem at the moderation level, but
there is even more of one at the end user/reader
level, where ASCII is pretty much the only thing you
dare assume is universally readable: character
displayability depends on code pages at the
receiving end, not on "newsgroups".

Remember that much of the third world is running on
donated hardware, and its associated software, both
no longer of value in more developed nations, and
nothing like what you see on your desktop. You cut
these people out of the loop if you assume that they
have a 2006 operating system release and all its
available fonts installed.

If the latter, is there a timetable for dragging
this machinery kicking and screaming into the
1990s?

How about a better plan? Drag the world's many
languages and ideosyncratic alphabets kicking and
screaming to one common small phonetic alphabet
(doesn't have to be ASCII), and one common language
(doesn't have to be English, but English is way, way
ahead among _second_ languages).

Unicode is an abomination.

Not picking on the moderator, but I'm wondering
why this situation persists, when the large
majority of other newsgroups I've encountered can
handle perfectly well the inclusion of "degree"
symbols (as used in degree-minute-second latitudes
and longitudes, surely appropriate usage for an
astronomical group ; my trip-up), or in this case
a person posting from France posting with the
*correct* spelling in boilerplate, which happens
to require characters not in US-ASCII (as defined
in the mid 1950s, I think).

That's not "the newsgroup" handling them, that's the
store and forward services software, and the
receiving end user machine's font richness handling
them. "Newsgroups" are a much higher level concept
than are the glyphs and glyph-code-sets they might
convey.

xanthian.

[Mod. note: I hope this gives a reasonable airing to the arguments:
let's go back to the astronomy now. -- mjh]

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