[rescue] OT: broken de-MIME-ers should be shot! ;-)

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, April 17, 2002 at 17:12:25 (-0400), Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] OT: broken de-MIME-ers should be shot!  ;-)
>
> I think the problem here is most of us are using ASCII mail readers.  Greg
> is using ISO-8859-1 (is that right?) which has a degree symbol.

Hmmm, yeah, as does Unicode....  It's easy to type too, just <ALT-0> on
my Sun-4 and NCD keyboards...  (which of course normally needs to follow
a <CTRL-Q> in emacs in order to be inserted into the buffer :-)

>  Since DeMIME
> is bringing it to plain old ASCII text, that degree symbol needs to be
> translated into something.

" deg. " or even " degrees " would have been better than another zero....

Who was the idiot who wrote that code anyway?  He or she had better have
a really good excuse, such as being completely blind or something....


> Now, that's the way my gut feel is, but I realize the world is not the US, and
> there are many symbols not properly represented in the ASCII set...  Maybe
> UTF-8 needs to become more common.

Personally I'd be quite happy with just ISO-8859, but I do have quite a
bit of direct experience working with (non-spammers!) in Asian and other
"Eastern" countries where any 8-bit character set encoding is lame and
useless....  Unicode/UTF-8 is probably the best possible solution, but
unless we _all_ start using M$-Win2k tomorrow, that's just not going to
happen very quickly....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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