• LXTerm to accept ANSI characters

    From Flavio Bessa@4:801/188 to All on Fri Feb 12 17:44:28 2021

    I've recently set up a Pi 2B and pretend to play around with some stuff on
    it.

    I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very much friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A42 2019/02/01 (Windows/64)
    * Origin: Saturn's Orbit BBS - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (4:801/188)
  • From Nikolaj Lazic@3:770/3 to All on Fri Feb 12 23:50:50 2021
    Dana Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:44:28 +1300, Flavio Bessa <nospam.Flavio.Bessa@f188.n801.z4.fidonet.org> napis'o:
    Hello folks,

    I've recently set up a Pi 2B and pretend to play around with some stuff on it.

    I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very much friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?


    uxterm?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to Flavio Bessa on Fri Feb 12 19:21:16 2021
    "Flavio Bessa" <nospam.Flavio.Bessa@f188.n801.z4.fidonet.org> wrote

    |
    | I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very much
    | friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?
    |

    Is there a reason to think the Pi has codepages?
    You'd need that, and you'd need to set the local
    codepage, in order to use ANSI. I thought that
    was only on Windows.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Dennis Lee Bieber@3:770/3 to All on Fri Feb 12 21:50:22 2021
    On Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:21:16 -0500, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> declaimed the following:

    "Flavio Bessa" <nospam.Flavio.Bessa@f188.n801.z4.fidonet.org> wrote

    |
    | I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very much
    | friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?
    |

    Is there a reason to think the Pi has codepages?
    You'd need that, and you'd need to set the local
    codepage, in order to use ANSI. I thought that
    was only on Windows.

    When I see someone mention "ANSI codes", I presume they mean something from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#CSI_(Control_Sequence_Introducer)_sequences>

    M$ Windows did not support ANSI codes until sometime in Win10 (primarily to allow the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" to handle common
    terminal controls).


    --
    Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

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  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to Dennis Lee Bieber on Fri Feb 12 22:25:59 2021
    "Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote

    | When I see someone mention "ANSI codes", I presume they mean something
    | from
    | <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#CSI_(Control_Sequence_Introducer)_sequences>
    |
    | M$ Windows did not support ANSI codes until sometime in Win10
    | (primarily to allow the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" to handle common
    | terminal controls).
    |

    I may have misunderstood, but he did say character codes.
    Windows has always been ANSI-based, with codepages to
    define bytes 128-255. It uses unicode-16 in theory but that's
    mostly under the surface. And UTF-8 is relatively recent.

    The man page has this:
    "lxterm - locale-sensitive wrapper for xterm"

    But I have no idea what kind of support there is for locale.
    It would have to be something like codepages, apparently
    in /usr/lib/locale. So I was guessing that Flavio Bessa wants
    support for a language that doesn't have a codepage installed.

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  • From Grant Taylor@3:770/3 to Dennis Lee Bieber on Fri Feb 12 22:11:28 2021
    On 2/12/21 7:50 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
    M$ Windows did not support ANSI codes until sometime in Win10
    (primarily to allow the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" to handle common terminal controls).

    Um....

    I used ANSI color codes a LONG time ago in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, via
    ANSI.SYS being loaded in CONFIG.SYS. I naively assume that Windows 9x
    and subsequent had comparable functionality. Perhaps it wasn't enabled
    by default. But I would be shocked if it wasn't there.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@3:770/3 to Flavio Bessa on Fri Feb 12 22:13:35 2021
    On 2/11/21 9:44 PM, Flavio Bessa wrote:
    Hello folks,

    Hi,

    I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very
    much friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?

    I know for a fact that XTerm, which it seems is the root of LXTerm, has supported ANSI control codes for at least 20 years as I've been using
    them in it for at least that long.

    Please provide more details about the problems that you're seeing.

    Also, can you reproduce the problems in standard XTerm?



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to Grant Taylor on Sat Feb 13 11:11:44 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 2/11/21 9:44 PM, Flavio Bessa wrote:
    Hello folks,

    Hi,

    I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very
    much friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?

    I know for a fact that XTerm, which it seems is the root of LXTerm, has supported ANSI control codes for at least 20 years as I've been using
    them in it for at least that long.

    Please provide more details about the problems that you're seeing.

    Also, can you reproduce the problems in standard XTerm?

    The ancestor of ANSI codes is surely the DEC VT100 from way back
    before PCs even existed, so pre-Windows certainly and probably pre-DOS.

    I agree though, just about every modern terminal emulator for Linux
    supports ANSI codes.

    Support of 'extended characters', those in the 128 to 255 range, i.e.
    not ASCII isn't really to do with ANSI codes. The ANSI codes are
    mostly ways to change character colours, bold, underline, etc.

    The 128 (well, strictly 144) to 255 'characters' are defined by what codepage/character encoding you are using. Codepages are beginning to disappear now but you can use them by setting your locale to things
    such as en_GB ISO-8859-1 (there's a whole series of ISO-8859 encodings
    from 1 to at least 15) ISO-8859-1 is the 'latin' set with standard
    West European langauages characters like accented e, a, c with a
    cedilla, etc. Other code pages have graphical characters etc.
    Read the manual pages about locale to configure these.

    The 'modern' way to handle extended/extra characters is UTF, I have
    all my systems set to the en_GB.UTF-8 locale now and everything 'just
    works' to the extent of displaying arabic, chinese and all sorts of
    other characters sets in my terminal windows.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Sat Feb 13 12:49:12 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:11:44 +0000
    Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:

    The 'modern' way to handle extended/extra characters is UTF

    It is, perhaps, worth adding that the reason that this is the
    modern way is that it is the *only* encoding capable of representing
    everything unambiguously.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

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  • From Nikolaj Lazic@3:770/3 to All on Sat Feb 13 13:56:27 2021
    Dana Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:27:44 +0100, Axel Berger <Spam@Berger-Odenthal.De> napis'o:
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    the *only* encoding capable of representing
    everything unambiguously.

    Yes it is ambiguous when the codepage is not expicitly declared but the bigger advantage is using more than one codepage in a single text, like quoting Hebrew and Greek in German. Personally I stick to TeX syntax
    even for those. One character -- one byte has its advantages if you like
    the command line and editor makros.

    The downside are the malicious possibilities it opens. In my eyes it was
    a big mistake to open domain names to more than ASCII. There are many
    (near) lookalikes and that fools even the careful user, who makes a
    point of checking the true destination before clicking.

    I still use unicode in Latex.

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  • From Axel Berger@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sat Feb 13 14:27:44 2021
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    the *only* encoding capable of representing
    everything unambiguously.

    Yes it is ambiguous when the codepage is not expicitly declared but the
    bigger advantage is using more than one codepage in a single text, like
    quoting Hebrew and Greek in German. Personally I stick to TeX syntax
    even for those. One character -- one byte has its advantages if you like
    the command line and editor makros.

    The downside are the malicious possibilities it opens. In my eyes it was
    a big mistake to open domain names to more than ASCII. There are many
    (near) lookalikes and that fools even the careful user, who makes a
    point of checking the true destination before clicking.


    --
    /\ No | Dipl.-Ing. F. Axel Berger Tel: +49/ 221/ 7771 8067
    \ / HTML | Roald-Amundsen-Strae 2a Fax: +49/ 221/ 7771 8069
    X in | D-50829 Kln-Ossendorf http://berger-odenthal.de
    / \ Mail | -- No unannounced, large, binary attachments, please! --

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  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Axel Berger on Sat Feb 13 13:55:44 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:27:44 +0100
    Axel Berger <Spam@Berger-Odenthal.De> wrote:

    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    the *only* encoding capable of representing
    everything unambiguously.

    Yes it is ambiguous when the codepage is not expicitly declared but the bigger advantage is using more than one codepage in a single text, like

    With UTF there are no codepages, OK the million point address space
    is broken up into blocks for different purposes but there's none of this nonsense of one value having multiple interpretations as in ISO-8859 et al.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

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  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sat Feb 13 09:01:44 2021
    "Ahem A Rivet's Shot" <steveo@eircom.net> wrote

    | > The 'modern' way to handle extended/extra characters is UTF
    |
    | It is, perhaps, worth adding that the reason that this is the
    | modern way is that it is the *only* encoding capable of representing
    | everything unambiguously.
    |

    More to the point, it's backward compatible with HTML,
    where the vast majority of webpages are still effectively
    ASCII, aside from the odd curly quote or space character
    inserted by editor software. Anything else would have
    required multi-byte characters for the ASCII range and
    thus would have broken editors and webpages.

    This way we can espouse the value of multiculturalism
    without changing very much. :)

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  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sat Feb 13 14:11:22 2021
    On 13/02/2021 14:01, Mayayana wrote:
    "Ahem A Rivet's Shot" <steveo@eircom.net> wrote

    | > The 'modern' way to handle extended/extra characters is UTF
    |
    | It is, perhaps, worth adding that the reason that this is the
    | modern way is that it is the *only* encoding capable of representing
    | everything unambiguously.
    |

    More to the point, it's backward compatible with HTML,
    where the vast majority of webpages are still effectively
    ASCII, aside from the odd curly quote or space character
    inserted by editor software. Anything else would have
    required multi-byte characters for the ASCII range and
    thus would have broken editors and webpages.

    This way we can espouse the value of multiculturalism
    without changing very much. :)


    Does any one else suspect that this post is utter bunk? UTF 8 is
    multibyte character sequences and its not necessarily compatible with
    HTML which uses straight, not curly, brackets.

    UTF8 is a layer above HTML. Its down to the browser and it's access to
    fonts to render it correctly and the server to specify that its in use.


    --
    "In our post-modern world, climate science is not powerful because it is
    true: it is true because it is powerful."

    Lucas Bergkamp

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  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sat Feb 13 10:48:48 2021
    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | Does any one else suspect that this post is utter bunk? UTF 8 is
    | multibyte character sequences and its not necessarily compatible with
    | HTML which uses straight, not curly, brackets.
    |

    I didn't say curly brackets. I said curly quotes. If you look
    at a typical English-language webpage online you'll find it's
    usually pure ASCII. When it's not, the only non-ASCII is typically
    a few things like curly quotes or space characters rendered in
    UTF-8. I'm guessing some editors do that, since it's not
    an easy job to write an article with curly quotes when straight
    quotes work just as well. What I'm saying is that most of the
    Internet still doesn't need more than ASCII, and ANSI in Europe.

    HTML is just text. It started out as ASCII and ended up
    with META tags to specify charset. So browsers could
    accommodate non-English languages. But most of it was
    English, and much of it still is. So it was 1 byte per character.
    That worked fine for most situations; everyhing but DBCS
    languages.

    As the Internet expanded and computing became mainstream
    around the world, we needed to adapt. ANSI was working for
    most languages but not for Chinese, Japanese, etc. So, what
    to do? It could go to unicode-16, but that still wouldn't cover
    all characters and it would require a radical shift to 2-byte
    characters, breaking the Internet and breaking computing.
    Text files on Windows still default to ANSI.
    It could go to 4-byte characters. That would work, but it
    would still break everything. Editors and browsers would need
    to all be rewritten.

    UTF-8 provided a smooth, easy, solution. It accommodates
    the millions of pages and files that are still essentially ASCII.
    Unlike with unicode 16 or 32, we don't have to add a null byte
    to every character in order to encode it.
    UTF-8 allows ANSI character sets to still be used. But it also
    provides a way to fully support multi-byte characters only
    where necessary. It's the one solution to support all languages
    without changing the default of 1 character to 1 byte.

    | UTF8 is a layer above HTML. Its down to the browser and it's access to
    | fonts to render it correctly and the server to specify that its in use.
    |
    UTF-8 is not a layer. It's character encoding. The HTML is
    plain text. The META content type tag specifies how that
    text is encoded. However it's done, it's still plain text. Fonts
    is a whole other kettle of fish.

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  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sat Feb 13 15:46:00 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 09:01:44 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    More to the point, it's backward compatible with HTML

    More accurately UTF-8 (not UTF-16 or UTF-32) is backward compatible with anything based on ASCII provided you stay in the ASCII range, this was
    an important design feature of UTF-8.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

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  • From TimS@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sat Feb 13 16:40:26 2021
    On 13 Feb 2021 at 15:48:48 GMT, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    UTF-8 provided a smooth, easy, solution. It accommodates
    the millions of pages and files that are still essentially ASCII.
    Unlike with unicode 16 or 32, we don't have to add a null byte
    to every character in order to encode it.
    UTF-8 allows ANSI character sets to still be used. But it also
    provides a way to fully support multi-byte characters only
    where necessary. It's the one solution to support all languages
    without changing the default of 1 character to 1 byte.

    It's only a default for ASCII, and the characters that ASCII supports. And
    when you say it allows ANSI character sets to be used, I take it you mean the characters that different ANSI pages supported, which under UTF-8 will most likely be 2-byte chars, rather than 1-byte but 8-bit values.

    --
    Tim

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  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Grant Taylor on Sat Feb 13 17:49:28 2021
    On 13/02/2021 17:30, Grant Taylor wrote:
    On 2/13/21 7:11 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    Does any one else suspect that this post is utter bunk? UTF 8 is
    multibyte character sequences and its not necessarily compatible with
    HTML which uses straight, not curly, brackets.

    The HTML /markup/ is basic ASCII.

    The HTML /page/, in it's entirety, may contain UTF-* directly, or the
    ASCII HTML codes therefor.

    UTF8 is a layer above HTML.

    Eh ... If you're talking about the HTML /file/ and not the HTML
    /markup/, then it's entirely possible to have raw UTF-* content in the
    text copy outside of the markup.

    That is what I meant

    HTML is not there to specify odd characters - it can but its job is to
    format text. What that text *is* is not relevant to HTML, It neither
    knows nor cares







    --
    Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
    to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

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  • From Grant Taylor@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sat Feb 13 10:30:37 2021
    On 2/13/21 7:11 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    Does any one else suspect that this post is utter bunk? UTF 8 is
    multibyte character sequences and its not necessarily compatible with
    HTML which uses straight, not curly, brackets.

    The HTML /markup/ is basic ASCII.

    The HTML /page/, in it's entirety, may contain UTF-* directly, or the
    ASCII HTML codes therefor.

    UTF8 is a layer above HTML.

    Eh ... If you're talking about the HTML /file/ and not the HTML
    /markup/, then it's entirely possible to have raw UTF-* content in the
    text copy outside of the markup.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sat Feb 13 11:09:57 2021
    On 2/13/21 10:49 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    HTML is not there to specify odd characters  - it can but its job is to format text.

    All of the HTML codes for special characters tends to disagree with you.

    &nbsp;
    &copy;
    &euro;
    &trade;
    ...

    Do a web search for "html special characters" and you will find long lists.

    I don't know what version of HTML these were introduced. But I do know
    that many of the basic ones have been there for at least 20 years (HTML 4?).



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sat Feb 13 18:39:27 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 18:11:57 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 17:49:28 +0000 The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    HTML is not there to specify odd characters - it can but its job is to
    format text.

    Nope, that's CSS's job. HTML's job is to add semantic markup - OK
    they dropped the ball with <b>, <i>, <br>, <blink> as well as some
    pre-css font and colour properties and ..., but mostly it's about
    semantic markup honest.

    ... plus all the (X)HTML Symbols and characters - &aacute; &amp;
    &pound ... which AFAIK can't be rendered with CSS.


    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Grant Taylor on Sat Feb 13 18:31:15 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:09:57 -0700, Grant Taylor wrote:

    On 2/13/21 10:49 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    HTML is not there to specify odd characters  - it can but its job is to
    format text.

    All of the HTML codes for special characters tends to disagree with you.

    &nbsp;
    &copy;
    &euro;
    &trade;
    ...

    Do a web search for "html special characters" and you will find long
    lists.

    I don't know what version of HTML these were introduced. But I do know
    that many of the basic ones have been there for at least 20 years (HTML
    4?).


    ... and are still there in HTML 5



    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sat Feb 13 18:11:57 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 17:49:28 +0000
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    HTML is not there to specify odd characters - it can but its job is to format text.

    Nope, that's CSS's job. HTML's job is to add semantic markup - OK
    they dropped the ball with <b>, <i>, <br>, <blink> as well as some pre-css
    font and colour properties and ..., but mostly it's about semantic markup honest.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

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  • From Grant Taylor@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sat Feb 13 12:02:30 2021
    On 2/13/21 11:31 AM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    .... and are still there in HTML 5

    IMHO HTML 5 was introduced 1) because things evolve and it had been 20+
    years, and 2) the industry wanted a standard way to do more multi-media
    things. Things which historically required plugins.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sat Feb 13 12:03:28 2021
    On 2/13/21 11:11 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    Nope, that's CSS's job. HTML's job is to add semantic markup - OK
    they dropped the ball with <b>, <i>, <br>, <blink> as well as some
    pre-css font and colour properties and ..., but mostly it's about
    semantic markup honest.

    That's the /current/ interpretation. 20 years ago, there was a
    different interpretation.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to TimS on Sat Feb 13 14:42:37 2021
    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | > UTF-8 allows ANSI character sets to still be used. But it also
    | > provides a way to fully support multi-byte characters only
    | > where necessary. It's the one solution to support all languages
    | > without changing the default of 1 character to 1 byte.
    |
    | It's only a default for ASCII, and the characters that ASCII supports. And
    | when you say it allows ANSI character sets to be used, I take it you mean
    the
    | characters that different ANSI pages supported, which under UTF-8 will
    most
    | likely be 2-byte chars, rather than 1-byte but 8-bit values.
    |

    Most ANSI character sets are also 1 byte to 1 character.
    It's only the DBCS languages that can't fit that model.
    So first we had ASCII. Then we had ANSI with codepages,
    and most languages could be fully represented in HTML
    using META content type. **All of that is 1 byte to 1
    character.** Only the DBCS languages were an exception.
    And they used a system similar to UTF-8.

    So it didn't require any fundamental change
    in character encoding, editors, or file formats. So-called
    wide character encoding, with 2 or more bytes per character,
    existed, but was not really used. 1 byte/ 1 character was
    nearly universal.

    So the only reason UTF-8 was needed was to fully
    accommodate DBCS languages, pile-of-shit emojis, etc.
    Most English pages are essentially ASCII, which is UTF-8
    conforming. And charset can be specified for ANSI
    interpretation.

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used. Browsers properly
    display curly quotes, but I actually only have one unicode
    font on my system, which is arial uncode MS, weighing in at
    24 MB. Nothing else will render most UTF-8 characters. For example,
    the RichEdit window in Windows has supported UTF-8 for
    some time. And I can use the ability in my own software.
    But it will only render if I use that Arial unicode font. With
    any other font it renders as ANSI using the English codepage.
    Just as a browser will do if charset isn't specced to be UTF-8.
    (Though UTF-8 may be default these days. I don't know. I
    still use:
    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

    Not that it really matters. It's pretty much all ASCII.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sat Feb 13 21:05:47 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:42:37 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used.

    Anyone who has to support multiple languages tends to use unicode internally for the sake of sanity (I was for a while internationalisation specialist (among other hats) on the Yahoo! front page team). We had loads
    of fun with external feeds claiming to be ISO8859-1 and sending Win-1252 - they're almost but not quite the same.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sat Feb 13 21:39:28 2021
    On 13 Feb 2021 at 18:31:15 GMT, Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:09:57 -0700, Grant Taylor wrote:

    On 2/13/21 10:49 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    HTML is not there to specify odd characters  - it can but its job is to >>> format text.

    All of the HTML codes for special characters tends to disagree with you.

    &nbsp;
    &copy;
    &euro;
    &trade;
    ...

    Do a web search for "html special characters" and you will find long
    lists.

    I don't know what version of HTML these were introduced. But I do know
    that many of the basic ones have been there for at least 20 years (HTML
    4?).


    ... and are still there in HTML 5

    Of course. A number of things are "deprecated" but nothing of any note has
    been removed, or will be. No browser maker is going to remove <b> and friends. Why would they. They had their fingers burnt before with XHTML. Just use HTML5 and forget everything else.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sat Feb 13 21:48:41 2021
    On 13 Feb 2021 at 19:42:37 GMT, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | > UTF-8 allows ANSI character sets to still be used. But it also
    | > provides a way to fully support multi-byte characters only
    | > where necessary. It's the one solution to support all languages
    | > without changing the default of 1 character to 1 byte.
    |
    | It's only a default for ASCII, and the characters that ASCII supports. And | when you say it allows ANSI character sets to be used, I take it you mean the
    | characters that different ANSI pages supported, which under UTF-8 will
    most
    | likely be 2-byte chars, rather than 1-byte but 8-bit values.
    |

    Most ANSI character sets are also 1 byte to 1 character.
    It's only the DBCS languages that can't fit that model.
    So first we had ASCII. Then we had ANSI with codepages,
    and most languages could be fully represented in HTML
    using META content type. **All of that is 1 byte to 1
    character.** Only the DBCS languages were an exception.
    And they used a system similar to UTF-8.

    You're thinking of western anguages with the extra chars used in French, German, Scandinavian languages etc. You seem to be overlooking languages that use a different alphabet altogether. Try Russian, Arabic, and Asian languages, all of which are comfortably catered for in UTF-8, as are the extra Western chars.

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used.

    Most web pages are UTF-8.

    Browsers properly
    display curly quotes, but I actually only have one unicode
    font on my system, which is arial uncode MS, weighing in at
    24 MB. Nothing else will render most UTF-8 characters. For example,
    the RichEdit window in Windows has supported UTF-8 for
    some time. And I can use the ability in my own software.

    Well I know nothing of Windows. And the question of which font doesn't enter into character representation.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sat Feb 13 21:49:44 2021
    On 13 Feb 2021 at 21:05:47 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net>
    wrote:

    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:42:37 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used.

    Anyone who has to support multiple languages tends to use unicode internally for the sake of sanity (I was for a while internationalisation specialist (among other hats) on the Yahoo! front page team). We had loads
    of fun with external feeds claiming to be ISO8859-1 and sending Win-1252 - they're almost but not quite the same.

    I convert everything to UTF-8. Windows tends to lie about which code-page it's using, anyway.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Axel Berger@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sat Feb 13 23:09:06 2021
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    but mostly it's about semantic markup honest.

    Yes and no. HTML is markup and characters are content. So by definition characters are not HTML. But still HTML defined how to encode those not
    part of 7-bit ASCII.


    --
    /\ No | Dipl.-Ing. F. Axel Berger Tel: +49/ 221/ 7771 8067
    \ / HTML | Roald-Amundsen-Strae 2a Fax: +49/ 221/ 7771 8069
    X in | D-50829 Kln-Ossendorf http://berger-odenthal.de
    / \ Mail | -- No unannounced, large, binary attachments, please! --

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Axel Berger@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sat Feb 13 23:13:16 2021
    Martin Gregorie wrote:
    ... plus all the (X)HTML Symbols and characters - &aacute; &amp;
    &pound ... which AFAIK can't be rendered with CSS.

    Characters can't be part of CSS. CSS is look and rendering, showing the
    same thing in different ways. An a and an &auml; are to different
    letters, they are different content. Content as such is part of neither
    HTML nor CSS, but the rules of how to encode characters in 7-bit source
    code has to be defined somewhere and so is part of the HTML package.


    --
    /\ No | Dipl.-Ing. F. Axel Berger Tel: +49/ 221/ 7771 8067
    \ / HTML | Roald-Amundsen-Strae 2a Fax: +49/ 221/ 7771 8069
    X in | D-50829 Kln-Ossendorf http://berger-odenthal.de
    / \ Mail | -- No unannounced, large, binary attachments, please! --

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Grant Taylor on Sat Feb 13 22:01:42 2021
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 12:03:28 -0700
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

    On 2/13/21 11:11 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    Nope, that's CSS's job. HTML's job is to add semantic markup - OK
    they dropped the ball with <b>, <i>, <br>, <blink> as well as some
    pre-css font and colour properties and ..., but mostly it's about
    semantic markup honest.

    That's the /current/ interpretation. 20 years ago, there was a
    different interpretation.

    Originally it's job was to link research papers together.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ronald@3:770/3 to Flavio Bessa on Sun Feb 14 13:12:39 2021
    In article <1003813579@f188.n801.z4.fidonet.org>,
    Flavio Bessa <nospam.Flavio.Bessa@f188.n801.z4.fidonet.org> wrote:
    Hello folks,

    I've recently set up a Pi 2B and pretend to play around with some stuff on it.

    I was trying to run Mystic, but it seems that the LXTerm is not very much friendly to ANSI character codes. Is there a way to tweak it?

    One thing I noticed recently was that setting LOCALE=enGB instead of the default en-GB-UTF8 also stopped the use of escape sequences.
    Sorry I forget the exact names, and I am on RISC OS at the moment.
    Useful if logging in with a terminal with no support.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 00:54:47 2021
    On 2021-02-13, TimS <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:

    On 13 Feb 2021 at 21:05:47 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:42:37 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used.

    Anyone who has to support multiple languages tends to use unicode
    internally for the sake of sanity (I was for a while internationalisation
    specialist (among other hats) on the Yahoo! front page team). We had loads >> of fun with external feeds claiming to be ISO8859-1 and sending Win-1252 - >> they're almost but not quite the same.

    I was a fan of ISO 8859-1 for a long time; it was the Amiga's native
    encoding right from its introduction in 1985. I've now switched to UTF-8.

    I convert everything to UTF-8. Windows tends to lie about which code-page it's using, anyway.

    Windows still has remnants of UTF-16 in various places.

    --
    /~\ Charlie Gibbs | "Some of you may die,
    \ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | but it's a sacrifice
    X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | I'm willing to make."
    / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lord Farquaad (Shrek)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sun Feb 14 03:38:10 2021
    On 13/02/2021 19:42, Mayayana wrote:


    Not that it really matters. It's pretty much all ASCII.


    Schrödingers cat would disagree - or ½ of him would.



    --
    “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

    —Soren Kierkegaard

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sun Feb 14 03:34:42 2021
    On 13/02/2021 18:11, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 17:49:28 +0000
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    HTML is not there to specify odd characters - it can but its job is to
    format text.

    Nope, that's CSS's job. HTML's job is to add semantic markup - OK
    they dropped the ball with <b>, <i>, <br>, <blink> as well as some pre-css font and colour properties and ..., but mostly it's about semantic markup honest.

    CSS is part of HTML

    <div> is not CSS. What is used to modify DIV is.


    --
    The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all
    private property.

    Karl Marx

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Axel Berger on Sun Feb 14 03:36:19 2021
    On 13/02/2021 22:09, Axel Berger wrote:
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    but mostly it's about semantic markup honest.

    Yes and no. HTML is markup and characters are content. So by definition characters are not HTML. But still HTML defined how to encode those not
    part of 7-bit ASCII.


    By saying 'content-type: UTF8' or whatever the exact magic spell is


    --
    The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all
    private property.

    Karl Marx

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Grant Taylor on Sun Feb 14 03:32:28 2021
    On 13/02/2021 18:09, Grant Taylor wrote:
    On 2/13/21 10:49 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    HTML is not there to specify odd characters  - it can but its job is
    to format text.

    All of the HTML codes for special characters tends to disagree with you.

    &nbsp;
    &copy;
    &euro;
    &trade;
    ...

    Do a web search for "html special characters" and you will find long lists.

    I know that.
    It was a pre UTF8 workaround back in the day

    But my point still stands.

    Once you have specified UTF8 in te HTML headers you don't need &euro;
    you can use "€" directkly. And its yuse or not is nothing toi do witrh HTML
    .
    The server passes a text stream to te browser, the browser notes that
    its UTF8 and if it has a suitable fpnt available displays the characters correctly



    I don't know what version of HTML these were introduced.  But I do know
    that many of the basic ones have been there for at least 20 years (HTML
    4?).

    Precisely. They are now essentially obsolescent. The only one you still
    *need*, because the others still work is &amp; :-)
    And possibly &nbsp;





    --
    “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to
    fill the world with fools.”

    Herbert Spencer

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 03:43:50 2021
    On 13/02/2021 21:49, TimS wrote:
    On 13 Feb 2021 at 21:05:47 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:42:37 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used.

    Anyone who has to support multiple languages tends to use unicode
    internally for the sake of sanity (I was for a while internationalisation
    specialist (among other hats) on the Yahoo! front page team). We had loads >> of fun with external feeds claiming to be ISO8859-1 and sending Win-1252 - >> they're almost but not quite the same.

    I convert everything to UTF-8. Windows tends to lie about which code-page it's
    using, anyway.

    So does MAC OSX
    UTF8 makes it all come right

    It's surprising how often I need it - type CO₂ or 25°C or
    ΔT=λC × ln(ΔCO₂) and you are in trouble without UTF8...


    --
    “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

    —Soren Kierkegaard

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 03:47:07 2021
    On 13/02/2021 21:48, TimS wrote:
    the question of which font doesn't enter
    into character representation.

    It does if the font in use has no representation of the glyph you are
    trying to display

    You wont get far trying to display Gujarati in Arial Narrow...


    --
    “when things get difficult you just have to lie”

    ― Jean Claud Jüncker

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sun Feb 14 06:01:17 2021
    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 03:34:42 +0000
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    On 13/02/2021 18:11, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    Nope, that's CSS's job. HTML's job is to add semantic markup -
    OK they dropped the ball with <b>, <i>, <br>, <blink> as well as some pre-css font and colour properties and ..., but mostly it's about
    semantic markup honest.

    CSS is part of HTML

    No it is not, you can use CSS to style any XML or SGML not just
    HTML.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sun Feb 14 09:39:35 2021
    On 14 Feb 2021 at 03:36:19 GMT, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    On 13/02/2021 22:09, Axel Berger wrote:
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    but mostly it's about semantic markup honest.

    Yes and no. HTML is markup and characters are content. So by definition
    characters are not HTML. But still HTML defined how to encode those not
    part of 7-bit ASCII.


    By saying 'content-type: UTF8' or whatever the exact magic spell is

    Just start your html page with:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

    End of.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sun Feb 14 09:41:10 2021
    On 14 Feb 2021 at 03:47:07 GMT, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    On 13/02/2021 21:48, TimS wrote:
    the question of which font doesn't enter
    into character representation.

    It does if the font in use has no representation of the glyph you are
    trying to display

    You wont get far trying to display Gujarati in Arial Narrow...

    I expect Gujarati has its own font(s).

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 10:24:44 2021
    TimS <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
    On 13 Feb 2021 at 21:05:47 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

    On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 14:42:37 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So all I was saying was that UTF-8 was far easier than
    any other approach, using "wide characters", when it came
    time to fully support all languages under one system. Even now
    I'm not sure how much it's really used.

    Anyone who has to support multiple languages tends to use unicode internally for the sake of sanity (I was for a while internationalisation specialist (among other hats) on the Yahoo! front page team). We had loads of fun with external feeds claiming to be ISO8859-1 and sending Win-1252 - they're almost but not quite the same.

    I convert everything to UTF-8. Windows tends to lie about which code-page it's
    using, anyway.

    Yes, as I said earlier, UTF-8 now in general just works with no hassle
    at all.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sun Feb 14 10:26:39 2021
    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 03:47:07 +0000
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    It does if the font in use has no representation of the glyph you are
    trying to display

    You wont get far trying to display Gujarati in Arial Narrow...

    Hence fontmap.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 12:47:51 2021
    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 09:39:35 +0000, TimS wrote:

    On 14 Feb 2021 at 03:36:19 GMT, The Natural Philosopher
    <tnp@invalid.invalid>
    wrote:

    On 13/02/2021 22:09, Axel Berger wrote:
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    but mostly it's about semantic markup honest.

    Yes and no. HTML is markup and characters are content. So by
    definition characters are not HTML. But still HTML defined how to
    encode those not part of 7-bit ASCII.


    By saying 'content-type: UTF8' or whatever the exact magic spell is

    Just start your html page with:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

    End of.

    If you're using 'tidy', leave out the "<html>" line, which gets objected
    to by 'tidy'. Simply starting the page with the two lines

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <head>

    is enough.

    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sun Feb 14 08:37:57 2021
    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | CSS is part of HTML
    |

    It's part of web design but it's an entirely different system
    and syntax. Though I suppose that's splitting hairs. STYLE
    is also an HTML attribute:

    <DIV STYLE="border-style: solid; Border-width: 3px;">

    Heck, these days most people even think javascript is
    integral to HTML. There's no decency anymore. :)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sun Feb 14 08:32:36 2021
    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | > Not that it really matters. It's pretty much all ASCII.
    | >
    | >
    | Schrdingers cat would disagree - or of him would.
    |

    :) I always wonder how people end up using these characters.
    There are ways to do it. I can copy the character from existing
    text. On Windows I think there's Charmap, though I've never
    used it. Schrodinger will just have to get by without his umlaut.
    Just as "naive" has survived without one.

    Then there's the matter of the mechanical entry system. My
    keyboard only has ASCII and a few extras.

    Where this really helps is with things like Chinese. But it only
    really helps them. For English speakers, we deal with pretty much all
    ASCII. And that's not the 1/2 of it. As you noted, if you want
    to write unicode you also need a unicode font. Browsers make
    it look simple, but for general text files it's not so simple. For
    example, I like to use Verdana for most text. But the font
    is not unicode. Windows will display UTF-8 as ANSI.

    If I visit xinhuanet.com I see Chinese characters. (Even though
    it's all Greek to me.) If I check the source code I see Chinese. If
    I download that and open it in my code editor as UTF-8 with
    Verdana font, I see some of the languages. It looks like I'm
    getting Russian and Arabic, for example. But the Chinese is all
    little boxes. If I open it in Notepad, since it's plain text with no
    file header, it shows as English ANSI with lots of little boxes.

    So it's a good solution for webpages, but once you get into
    entering, editing and storing multi-lingual text it gets very
    complicated. Only for those of us who speak English is it
    reasonable to say that UTF-8 makes everything easy. It does,
    but only because it's usually exactly the same byte string as
    ASCII. In fact, if I happen to come across
    UTF-8 text or HTML code I'll generally convert it to ASCII/ANSI
    for convenience. It's too much trouble trying to access it across
    different programs and displays at UTF-8. On Linux, where that's
    standard, it's fine. But we have to remember that this is
    representational file encoding. UTF-8 by itself is no miracle.

    Microsoft are one of the sites that have used UTF-8 for years.
    It's all English on their English pages, but they spec it as
    UTF-8, use curly quotes and UTF-8 space characters. Neither
    is necessary and it complicates things. Both of these will work
    with an English codepage. The first should work anywhere:

    &ldquo;curly &#nbsp; quotes&rdquo;
    &#147;curly &#160; quotes&#148;

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sun Feb 14 15:12:27 2021
    On 14 Feb 2021 at 13:32:36 GMT, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | > Not that it really matters. It's pretty much all ASCII.
    | >
    | >
    | Schrödingers cat would disagree - or ½ of him would.
    |

    :) I always wonder how people end up using these characters.
    There are ways to do it. I can copy the character from existing
    text. On Windows I think there's Charmap, though I've never
    used it. Schrodinger will just have to get by without his umlaut.
    Just as "naive" has survived without one.

    Then there's the matter of the mechanical entry system. My
    keyboard only has ASCII and a few extras.

    So does mine. But in System Prefs -> Keyboard -> Keyboard-tab I have ticked "Show Keyboard Viewer in menu bar". Then if I open that while some app is running, I get a window showing the keyboard and showing the key(s) that I
    have currently pressed. They also show what char I would get from pressing
    some key combo, such as a key modifier like Alt or Shift.

    So Alt-v gets me √ and Alt-7 gets me ¶ and so on. There is also a simple way to modify such as e to get é or è which is indicated by some keys which turn orange in this keyboard window when a modifier is pressed. So if I press Alt
    by itself, the e key turns orange and shows ´. The ` key also turns orange and shows `. This tells me that if I press Alt and e followed by e then I get é, and if I press Alt and ` followed by e I get è.

    So it's all simple and visual, no fucking hex shit to remember, that's all for the birds. And so I can do quite a lot of extra chars just from the ASCII keyboard with no problems.

    If I open the Character Viewer instead from the menu bar then I can include quite a large number of symbols just by dragging to this app's compose window. Have the white and black queens: ♕ and ♛. The Character Viewer gives me access
    to all of Unicode.

    And just to keep TNP happy here's some Gujarati: શ ણ ઊ ૐ . Hope it's not
    rude.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sun Feb 14 14:58:31 2021
    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 08:32:36 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So it's a good solution for webpages, but once you get into
    entering, editing and storing multi-lingual text it gets very
    complicated. Only for those of us who speak English is it
    reasonable to say that UTF-8 makes everything easy.

    Not so! Unicode is the enabler for anyone who needs to handle
    multiple scripts and languages, sure if you just want CJK then you could
    use SHIFT-JIS but if you want to be able to hold text and not worry about
    what script or language it belongs to and mix scripts and languages freely
    then Unicode is the only solution.

    As for the font problem - that is want fontmap was invented for. I thought Windows had something similar.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sun Feb 14 15:17:25 2021
    On 14 Feb 2021 at 14:58:31 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net>
    wrote:

    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 08:32:36 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    So it's a good solution for webpages, but once you get into
    entering, editing and storing multi-lingual text it gets very
    complicated. Only for those of us who speak English is it
    reasonable to say that UTF-8 makes everything easy.

    Not so! Unicode is the enabler for anyone who needs to handle
    multiple scripts and languages, sure if you just want CJK then you could
    use SHIFT-JIS but if you want to be able to hold text and not worry about what script or language it belongs to and mix scripts and languages freely then Unicode is the only solution.

    UTF-8 maps directly onto Unicode. Given the UTF-8 byte sequence, you can directly compute the Unicode value. UTF-8 has a number of advantages such as:

    1) It is compatible with ASCII (which forms the bottom page of Unicode)

    2) You can recover from a transmission error which may add or remove a byte or two.

    So all those ANSI pages need to go in the bin, really speaking.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Axel Berger@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 17:04:36 2021
    TimS wrote:
    But in System Prefs -> Keyboard -> Keyboard-tab I have ticked
    "Show Keyboard Viewer in menu bar".

    You're lucky. I tried to enable the screen keyboard in Windows.
    Installing keyboards in other languages like hebrew and russion, as I
    have done, helps little, if you don't know where the keys are. What does Windows display? The German keyboard regardless of what is chosen as
    active at the time. Thank you Microsoft.


    --
    /\ No | Dipl.-Ing. F. Axel Berger Tel: +49/ 221/ 7771 8067
    \ / HTML | Roald-Amundsen-Strae 2a Fax: +49/ 221/ 7771 8069
    X in | D-50829 Kln-Ossendorf http://berger-odenthal.de
    / \ Mail | -- No unannounced, large, binary attachments, please! --

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sun Feb 14 15:00:51 2021
    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 08:37:57 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | CSS is part of HTML
    |

    It's part of web design but it's an entirely different system
    and syntax. Though I suppose that's splitting hairs.

    Not really, there's an important separation CSS applies to any XML
    or SGML not just HTML.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Feb 14 17:09:19 2021
    On 14 Feb 2021 15:17:25 GMT
    TimS <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:

    So all those ANSI pages need to go in the bin, really speaking.

    Yes, along with SHIFT-JIS and other specialised multi-byte
    encodings.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sun Feb 14 12:25:22 2021
    "Ahem A Rivet's Shot" <steveo@eircom.net> wrote

    | > It's part of web design but it's an entirely different system
    | > and syntax. Though I suppose that's splitting hairs.
    |
    | Not really, there's an important separation CSS applies to any XML
    | or SGML not just HTML.
    |

    You snipped my example. The "cascading" part applies
    there. First is the CSS file. Then that's overridden by
    CSS in the STYLE tag of the page. Then that can be
    overridden by a STYLE attribute in the HTML tag. If
    you want pretty fonts for your XML that's up to you,
    but CSS is still deeply entagled with HTML. To not
    recognize that when writing webpages is to not know
    how to use it properly.

    I know many people ar sticklers about keeping the CSS
    and HTML separate, but in practice it just doesn't work
    that way.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Sun Feb 14 19:05:34 2021
    On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:25:22 -0500
    "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "Ahem A Rivet's Shot" <steveo@eircom.net> wrote

    | > It's part of web design but it's an entirely different system
    | > and syntax. Though I suppose that's splitting hairs.
    |
    | Not really, there's an important separation CSS applies to any XML
    | or SGML not just HTML.
    |

    You snipped my example. The "cascading" part applies

    Because it wasn't relevant to my point.

    there. First is the CSS file. Then that's overridden by
    CSS in the STYLE tag of the page. Then that can be
    overridden by a STYLE attribute in the HTML tag. If

    *IF* it is being applied to HTML - nothing about CSS requires that
    it be applied to HTML.

    you want pretty fonts for your XML that's up to you,

    That is the point I can use XML without using HTML, and indeed
    often do - not so much for pretty fonts but for laying out XML data for viewing. Unlike HTML most XML has no display semantics at all and so CSS is *required* to display it as anything other that slightly enhanced source.

    but CSS is still deeply entagled with HTML. To not

    I can also use HTML without using CSS. They are independent, but
    can and often are used cooperatively even though neither requires the other.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Mon Feb 15 10:26:09 2021
    On 14/02/2021 13:32, Mayayana wrote:
    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | > Not that it really matters. It's pretty much all ASCII.
    | >
    | >
    | Schrödingers cat would disagree - or ½ of him would.
    |

    :) I always wonder how people end up using these characters.
    There are ways to do it. I can copy the character from existing
    text. On Windows I think there's Charmap, though I've never
    used it. Schrodinger will just have to get by without his umlaut.
    Just as "naive" has survived without one.

    Then there's the matter of the mechanical entry system. My
    keyboard only has ASCII and a few extras.

    mine (mint MATE) has a caps lock key mapped to compose, so caps lock
    -1-2 gives me ½

    That takes care of most of what I need.


    Where this really helps is with things like Chinese. But it only
    really helps them. For English speakers, we deal with pretty much all
    ASCII. And that's not the 1/2 of it. As you noted, if you want
    to write unicode you also need a unicode font. Browsers make
    it look simple, but for general text files it's not so simple. For
    example, I like to use Verdana for most text. But the font
    is not unicode. Windows will display UTF-8 as ANSI.

    If I visit xinhuanet.com I see Chinese characters. (Even though
    it's all Greek to me.) If I check the source code I see Chinese. If
    I download that and open it in my code editor as UTF-8 with
    Verdana font, I see some of the languages. It looks like I'm
    getting Russian and Arabic, for example. But the Chinese is all
    little boxes. If I open it in Notepad, since it's plain text with no
    file header, it shows as English ANSI with lots of little boxes.

    So it's a good solution for webpages, but once you get into
    entering, editing and storing multi-lingual text it gets very
    complicated. Only for those of us who speak English is it
    reasonable to say that UTF-8 makes everything easy. It does,
    but only because it's usually exactly the same byte string as
    ASCII. In fact, if I happen to come across
    UTF-8 text or HTML code I'll generally convert it to ASCII/ANSI
    for convenience. It's too much trouble trying to access it across
    different programs and displays at UTF-8. On Linux, where that's
    standard, it's fine. But we have to remember that this is
    representational file encoding. UTF-8 by itself is no miracle.

    Microsoft are one of the sites that have used UTF-8 for years.
    It's all English on their English pages, but they spec it as
    UTF-8, use curly quotes and UTF-8 space characters. Neither
    is necessary and it complicates things. Both of these will work
    with an English codepage. The first should work anywhere:

    &ldquo;curly &#nbsp; quotes&rdquo;
    &#147;curly &#160; quotes&#148;




    --
    Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early
    twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and,
    on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer
    projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

    Richard Lindzen

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to TimS on Mon Feb 15 10:30:02 2021
    On 14/02/2021 15:12, TimS wrote:
    And just to keep TNP happy here's some Gujarati: શ ણ ઊ ૐ . Hope it's not
    rude.
    Lucky I have gujarati capable fonts in use


    ᚠᚲ ᛗᛖ

    --
    "What do you think about Gay Marriage?"
    "I don't."
    "Don't what?"
    "Think about Gay Marriage."

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Mon Feb 15 08:56:34 2021
    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | Lucky I have gujarati capable fonts in use
    |
    |
    | ᚲ ᛗᛖ
    |

    Indeed. I see "as", "as" squared, a-, a-.
    But I'm sure that's a very funny joke in India.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Mon Feb 15 17:48:37 2021
    On 15 Feb 2021 at 13:56:34 GMT, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | Lucky I have gujarati capable fonts in use
    |
    |
    | ᚠᚲ ᛗᛖ
    |

    Indeed. I see "as", "as" squared, a-, a-.
    But I'm sure that's a very funny joke in India.

    You obviously need to get a new Usenet client.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to TimS on Mon Feb 15 15:04:06 2021
    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | You obviously need to get a new Usenet client.
    |
    No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    cures them of emoji mania. :)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Mon Feb 15 21:23:17 2021
    On 15 Feb 2021 at 20:04:06 GMT, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | You obviously need to get a new Usenet client.
    |
    No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    cures them of emoji mania. :)

    Even if you only read/write English, there are plenty of symbols and
    characters you might see/use available via UTF-8.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Tue Feb 16 00:55:42 2021
    On 2021-02-15, Mayayana <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    You obviously need to get a new Usenet client.

    No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    cures them of emoji mania. :)

    *applause*

    --
    /~\ Charlie Gibbs | "Some of you may die,
    \ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | but it's a sacrifice
    X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | I'm willing to make."
    / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lord Farquaad (Shrek)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Tue Feb 16 02:26:10 2021
    On 15/02/2021 20:04, Mayayana wrote:
    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | You obviously need to get a new Usenet client.
    |
    No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    cures them of emoji mania. :)


    W⚓

    --
    “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established
    authorities are wrong.”

    ― Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Tue Feb 16 08:00:31 2021
    On 15 Feb 2021 at 20:04:06 GMT, "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote:

    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | You obviously need to get a new Usenet client.
    |
    No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    cures them of emoji mania. :)

    You're obviously making life too easy for yourself. Why not just junk all this useful software nonsense, and read the bits directly off the disk. All you
    need is a bar magnet, a magnifying glass, and some fine iron filings.
    Simples!

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to TimS on Tue Feb 16 09:44:11 2021
    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | > No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    | > It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    | > can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    | > about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    | > to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    | > to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    | > cures them of emoji mania. :)
    |
    | You're obviously making life too easy for yourself. Why not just junk all this
    | useful software nonsense, and read the bits directly off the disk. All you
    | need is a bar magnet, a magnifying glass, and some fine iron filings.
    | Simples!
    |
    :) This seems to really get your goat. If you'll recall,
    all I said was that UTF-8 was a good choice because
    for English-speaking people and most webpages it was
    an invisible transition. That might not be politically
    correct, but it's true.

    If you're on Linux and text files default to UTF-8 then
    that's handy. You'll never need to know that the encoding
    is not ASCII/ANSI. Since all my text files and HTML files are
    essentially ASCII, I convert any UTF-8 I get to that.
    For me UTF-8 is only corrupted text data.

    For many people, UTF-8 is a great solution. That's fine.
    But if you're going to send me funky characters for no reason,
    in English, in a text-based medium, I see no reason to figure
    out how to decipher it... And imagine my dismay at going to the
    trouble only to find that someone has sent me 4 crying faces,
    3 piles of shit, and an umbrella... or is that a soccer ball?
    Or that they're trying to show off by sending some ditty in
    Turkish or Russian... I still don't know what it means. I can't
    read Turkish and Russian.

    And what the heck does 4 crying faces and 3 piles of
    shit and an umbrella mean? The sender is having a tantrum?
    They've eaten too many prunes? They hate shitting? Or maybe
    it's an inside joke. Maybe that's Beyonce's famous signature?
    Sort of a "proud to be cranky" gimmick? Maybe it's Taylor
    Swift's official breakup note? Maybe the sender is signalling
    their fondness for some foul tempered rock star?

    Who knows? It's
    hardly an articulate expression. I pretty much ignore
    emojis, anyway, for that reason. I usually don't know
    what they mean. I just figured out that what I thought
    was a corncob is probably "anjali" -- praying hands. So...
    what?... a hippie is writing to me and they've developed
    that irritating behavioral tic of bowing to express false
    humility? ... Or maybe it really is a corncob. Beats me.
    I need UTF-8 so that I can see such crap? I don't think so.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Mayayana on Wed Feb 17 11:20:54 2021
    On 16/02/2021 14:44, Mayayana wrote:
    "TimS" <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote

    | > No. I can only read English. I only write English.
    | > It's of no value to see characters in languages I
    | > can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
    | > about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
    | > to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
    | > to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
    | > cures them of emoji mania. :)
    |
    | You're obviously making life too easy for yourself. Why not just junk all this
    | useful software nonsense, and read the bits directly off the disk. All you | need is a bar magnet, a magnifying glass, and some fine iron filings.
    | Simples!
    |
    :) This seems to really get your goat. If you'll recall,
    all I said was that UTF-8 was a good choice because
    for English-speaking people and most webpages it was
    an invisible transition. That might not be politically
    correct, but it's true.

    If you're on Linux and text files default to UTF-8 then
    that's handy. You'll never need to know that the encoding
    is not ASCII/ANSI. Since all my text files and HTML files are
    essentially ASCII, I convert any UTF-8 I get to that.
    For me UTF-8 is only corrupted text data.

    For many people, UTF-8 is a great solution. That's fine.
    But if you're going to send me funky characters for no reason,
    in English, in a text-based medium, I see no reason to figure
    out how to decipher it... And imagine my dismay at going to the
    trouble only to find that someone has sent me 4 crying faces,
    3 piles of shit, and an umbrella... or is that a soccer ball?
    Or that they're trying to show off by sending some ditty in
    Turkish or Russian... I still don't know what it means. I can't
    read Turkish and Russian.

    And what the heck does 4 crying faces and 3 piles of
    shit and an umbrella mean? The sender is having a tantrum?

    No, they are tossers who can safely be ignored
    Dont knock the value of knowing that


    They've eaten too many prunes? They hate shitting? Or maybe
    it's an inside joke. Maybe that's Beyonce's famous signature?
    Sort of a "proud to be cranky" gimmick? Maybe it's Taylor
    Swift's official breakup note? Maybe the sender is signalling
    their fondness for some foul tempered rock star?

    Who knows? It's
    hardly an articulate expression. I pretty much ignore
    emojis, anyway, for that reason. I usually don't know
    what they mean. I just figured out that what I thought
    was a corncob is probably "anjali" -- praying hands. So...
    what?... a hippie is writing to me and they've developed
    that irritating behavioral tic of bowing to express false
    humility? ... Or maybe it really is a corncob. Beats me.
    I need UTF-8 so that I can see such crap? I don't think so.


    Exactly. you don't want their choices forced on you so don't force your
    choices on them!

    And don't complain then that there is no mutual communication.


    --
    Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
    to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Mayayana@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Wed Feb 17 08:47:25 2021
    "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote

    | Exactly. you don't want their choices forced on you so don't force your
    | choices on them!
    |
    Choices. That's an interesting way to cast it. In a
    culture with no standard of ethics, and a radical non-
    existence of community, we've come up with a consumer
    definition of ethics that even the wokists and MAGAs
    agree to: Evil is impeding someone else's choice, especially
    in consumer matters. Good is asserting one's own choices.
    Actual relationship, like sex, marriage and friendship, then
    becomes a negotiated contract of mutual service, to be
    continued as long as both parties feel it expresses their
    choice.

    So, in the spirit of the times, let me just say that I support
    the right of all sexes and all races to choose between all
    emojis. It gives me a warm feeling to be so civilized.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)