begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 05:07:57PM -0800: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > >Don't know, don't care; if it's not ASCII, it shouldn't be in email. > > Usually I agree but: what if you don't speak english?
Conventions for how you encode your language is something you must work out with your correspondent. Remember, ASCII isn't a complete glyph set by any means even for English -- it's a _minimum_ /useful/ set. This whole thread got started because non-ASCII glyphs where used in an English post. There are conventions for indicating footnotes in ASCII text already. And bold, italics, underline, and so forth. Yes, they're not perfect. Yes, they're not as pretty as they could be. But it works everywhere. That's the tradeoff. Yeah, ASCII is old, and there's a strong sentiment that anything old must be replaced, but it *worked*. Everyone can talk to everyone else. That was a _huge_ step forward, and we discard that ability at our peril. (If we're going to throw out ASCII, we might as well throw out stuff like TCP/IP -- it's old, non-optimum, and ubiquituous, and so it is obviously in need of replacement....) -- Where's my UTF7? Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
