Re: Wasteful internationalization

[Markus E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

Bj�rn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> writes:

> Larry Kilgallen wrote:
>
>> And what client on my VMS system would display those characters on my
>> VT102 (emulator) ?
>
> I don't know VMS. comp.os.vms might be a better place to ask about that.
>
>> It seems to me that people in newsgroups should stick to ASCII.
>
> So, you want the entire world to use the American Standard Code? I suppose
> we should all drop our un-American, nonstandard languages and only speak
> and write American Standard English, right? Maybe we should give up all
> un-American, nonstandard culture and watch nothing but American Standard
> Hollywood movies? Perhaps you also want all countries to join the Holy
> American Empire and let the American Standard President reign for ever and
> ever?

Look, Bj�rn -- I think this wall uncalled for. _I_ remember times when
it was considered part of the netiquette to use only 7-Bit-ASCII,
because you couldn't expect everybody haiving the latest and greatest
software. There were various Unices in various states of coming to
grips with non-7-bit characters and there was VMS and not all software
was readily available for all systems.

And I would like to add: That really hasn't changed in principle. 5
years ago I could read almost every mail I got. Then mails with
8859-15 became more common (Euro sign) and I couldn't read them. And
then UTF-8 mails abounded. Without me doing anything wrong, my news
reader slowly decayed into obsolescence.

I hate it when that happens. 

> Look, nobody is forcing you to use a MIME-aware newsreader. It may be that
> there is none that runs on VMS. In that case you have a choice: Use VMS and

Tell you what: VT102. It's a hardware problem, not a software one. You
seem to be missing some historical perspective :-).

> not see all characters right, or see the characters but not on VMS. Decide
> what's more important to you. I don't care what you choose, but I do take
> offence when you try to force an outdated and hopelessly insufficient

Did he force you? Or did he just inform you that he can't see the 'Pi'
and probably won't see it ever. You can ignore his information, I
think.

> standard on *me* just because *your* software is limited.

Ah, well, I've seen people applying the same rethorics to HTML
mail.

> Usenet is international. Deal with it.

15 years ago, you'd simply have refused to participate, wouldn't you?
And if not what does that tell us about the absolute necessity of
umlauts? Especially in the context of being able to be read by other
people.

BTW: I have Gnus on a rather current Linux system. I couldn't see the
Pi, too. This happens sometimes and do you know what: I don't read
posts I can't display or decode (same with web pages). Yes there are
probably ways to fix this, but since this doesn't occur too often, I
think I can live without the things I'm missing.

Regards -- Markus