America and Americans / Europeans

[Mark A Mandel]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, sagehen wrote:

#>first theoretical boundary is at 7deg 30min, and the next one at 22deg
#>30min.)
#>
#>-- Mark M.
#
#That zone stretches all the way across mainland China, covering more than
#50š.

What you doubtless meant as a degree sign shows up for me in varying
degrees (no pun intended) of "I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't display that
character" obscurity. That's why I typed out the abbreviations.

Time for the ASCII rant. Not ranting at you, mind you; just as a general
reminder:

        =============

No underlines, no italics, no boldface, no color, no size specification,
no font specification, no justified lines, no settable margins, no
accented characters, no curly quotes, no en or em dashes, no ellipses...

Nothing comes across except ASCII. That *does not* include any of the
above. And there is no such thing as "8-bit ASCII". All that newsgroups or
email will reliably carry is the characters that you can get on a standard
US keyboard without using ALT or CTRL:

Letters: a-z, A-Z
Digits: 0-9
Punctuation and special characters:
        !@#$%^&*()
        _-+=/
        ,.:;"'?
        <>`~
        {}[]|\  (these last 6 may look different in Scandinavia)
Whitespace:
        SPACE
        TAB (which will come out differently on different machines,
         programs, and so on. As I type this the T of "TAB" lines up
         under the "c" of "Whitespace"; your mileage may vary.)
        RETURN or ENTER (which produces different code on different
         platforms. The Internet can translate that much in the text
         of a message, but not in an attachment.)

        =========

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Back to ADS-ery.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large