On 1/30/03 17:20, Mledie at aol.com wrote >Thanks, Bill, I am learning a lot. Yes, every time I get an e-mail from >someone not changing his HTML setting into plain text, all the Umlauts, ? >etc. turn into 4-8 characters. I have developed a skill to read these >things, -but what I am referring to, for example is this: The New York Times, in >the daily e-mail to me, refers me to a sight to read more about and gives >the URL address. When I then copy and paste it, during this transfer, there is >often going to be added ( as a gratuity) % with a string of >letters(numbers) often in the middle of the address. It is not in the address >given in the e-mail. Of course with this added baggage, the site can't be found. >I learned the hard way when that happens , to check the address and delete >this added combination. Where behind the szenes does that take place? It is >one of those annoyances I would rather do without.
The other problem that arises is the following: ASCII is the code which says which number in the computer (like 65) goes with which letter (like A). It has a standard definition up to the number 127, and then has several different 'standards' for the numbers 128 to 255. When you type ?, I see ? because I'm using Mac encoding in an old mail program (emailer). If you sent it to an MS Windows user, they'd see something else, because the high characters are encoded differently. Another standard for encoding which is seeping through the computer world is unicode, which uses twice the space in the computer for each letter, but then allows 64k different encodings (so that not only latin letters but cyrillic, chinese, simplified chinese, korean, japanese, armenian, etc.) letters can be encoded uniformly). This will also cause problems if the mailer isn't set to understand unicode. Now... why you're having difference between the copied and pasted url is beyond me. It could be that the encodings are set differently for the mailer and the browser, but I don't know how to fix it (or even if it is impossible). >Marta > >P.S. You see, I need a lecture on the HTML ? ( sometimes HTM ?) mystery- as >well as a personalized lecture on "Mail", since I was unable to be present >when Harry gave his much anticipated presentation. for html, try taking a look at http://www.w3c.org/MarkUp and look at some of the tutorials. Another way to see how basic html works is to go to a simple site and use the view->source in your browser. Complicated sites will have all sorts of javascripts in them, so you won't see the html itself. It's probably not worth looking at too many of them. Bill | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
