From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,699cc914522aa7c4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,UTF8 Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nx02.iad01.newshosting.com!newshosting.com!newsfeed.icl.net!newsfeed.fjserv.net!news-lond.gip.net!news.gsl.net!gip.net!news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!newspeer1.se.telia.net!se.telia.net!masternews.telia.net.!newsb.telia.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn?= Persson Subject: Re: Wasteful internationalization Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <_wrvh.30646$E02.12547@newsb.telia.net> User-Agent: KNode/0.10.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit Message-ID: Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:33:35 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 83.250.96.174 X-Complaints-To: abuse@telia.com X-Trace: newsb.telia.net 1171244015 83.250.96.174 (Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:33:35 CET) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:33:35 CET Organization: Telia Internet Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9267 Date: 2007-02-12T01:33:35+00:00 List-Id: Markus E Leypold wrote: > So why do you feel so strongly on encodings? Lots and lots of software is crawling with character encoding bugs. Take our brand new Gnuada-maintainers mailing list for example. In the welcome message my name was turned into "Björn". Somebody's had the *scintillating* idea of encoding non-English letters as XML character references – in a plaintext message! And if you look in the archive, at the message I sent to the list, my ö has become an invalid UTF-8 code, because they've specified the encoding of the web page as UTF-8, but they haven't bothered converting the message from Latin-1 to UTF-8. These things happen all the time and I'm thoroughly sick of it. These bugs are produced by egocentric USian coders who think that the USA is the entire world and that the English alphabet is the only one that matters. They only test their programs with English sample texts, and as all of the most popular encodings are compatible with ASCII they never see any bad consequences of ignoring character encodings, so they keep doing it. I'm not going to avoid non-ASCII characters just to help ignorant coders remain ignorant. > I hardly ever write German on the > net. So how representative are you? Do Germans mostly communicate in English between themselves? I kind of doubt it. Swedes send email in Swedish to each other, and web sites for a Swedish audience are written in Swedish, and it's damned annoying every time buggy USian software mangles the text. -- Björn Persson PGP key A88682FD omb jor ers @sv ge. r o.b n.p son eri nu