50% Spanish or German, 50% Chinese

[Lars Henrik Mathiesen]

> Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:00:50 -0700
> From: Steven Schaufele <fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw>

> [... I] have recently received many postings including extended and
> richly-exemplified discussions of Spanish vocabulary, and most of
> the words in question have been printed half in Spanish and half in
> Chinese [...]

Check to see if the mail program and/or the terminal program you are
using has a character set setting --- and set it to Latin-1 to read
list mail. If it doesn't, enter a bug report.

(Technically, for this to happen, the software has to recognize the
MIME format, and convert from a pure-ASCII representation to 8-bit
data. The MIME format clearly and unambiguously indicates which
character set the data are in (e.g., Latin-1) --- but the software
(another bit of it, perhaps) then turns around and pretends that the
data are really in another character set, presumably the standard
Taiwanese multi-byte character set.)

> I've recently begun noticing similar problems with postings in German.

It's unavoidable that when the technology exists to use national
characters, they will be used. The dominant mail platform in the
Internet today is a browser on Windows, where users don't even know
which characters are ASCII and which aren't --- as witnessed by many
posts using the double left and right quote characters (not even part
of Latin-1).

Unicode is on its way in too --- if Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 does
not already by default send mail that is unreadable in a non-MIME
reader, I'm sure that will happen in the Windows 2000 version.

So, it may be possible to make this list into a backwater where people
learn TeX codes and refrain from using accented characters out of
politeness. But it's only a question of time before people have to
upgrade anyway, if only to be able to read mail from aunt Agatha.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn at diku.dk> (Humour NOT marked)

[ Moderator's comment:
  The mail system on which this list is operated is 7-bit ASCII only, and will
  remain so for the foreseeable future.  I'm sorry, but the lowest common
  denominator is preferable to Windows-only capabilities.  As I have noted
  elsewhere, not even other 8-bit-capable systems agree with Windows encodings.
  --rma ]