America and Americans / Europeans

[sagehen]

Mark Mandel writes:

>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...

~~~~~~~~
  Gotcha.  Actually, I knew about the limitations of ASCII & have a table
somewhere that I've even been known to consult for that first group of 170
or so characters that travel successfully through cyberspace.  I usually
use the conventions /..../, *....* and _......_ for italics, bold &
underline respectively.  But I'm  a computer simpleton running an elderly
Mac with an early Eudora mail program & am often puzzled by what goes on
after I push "send." One of my correspondents, who has very similar
equipment, also told me that when I use the degree sign it arrives on her
screen bollixed up.  On the other hand my recent post, after passing
through whatever it is that happens out there, returned to me via the List
with the sign intact.  I see lots of posts from other lists replete with
strange substitutions for basic punctuation marks.  I also get posts that
seem to evade the limitations of ASCII by being able to impose on my screen
their bold & italics & even color.
AM
~~~~~~~
 >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


A&M Murie
N. Bangor NY
sagehen at westelcom.com