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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. |
#2
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ASCII-only ?
(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 |
#3
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ASCII-only ?
"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] -- Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG |
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