A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Alan Kennedy]

Martin v. Loewis:
>>>> So what do you think about this message?:
>>>>
>>>> γίγνωσκω
>>>>
>>>> Look Ma, no markup. And not every character uses two bytes,
>>>> either.
>>>> And I can use Umlauts (äöü) and Arabic (ءﺎﻣ.ﺔﻛﺮﺷ)
>>>> if I want to.

Alan Kennedy:

> The final point I'd like to make [explicit] is: nobody had to ask
> me how or why my xml snippet worked: there were no tricks. Nobody
> asked for debugging information, or for reasons why they couldn't
> see it:


eltronic at juno.com wrote:

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> 
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> 
> is how my email picked it up.
> 
> other messages and replys were inconsistently rendered.
> 
> isn't this the kind of thing the test groups were designed for?
> 
> IIR, 7 bits is the standard in email & usenet.
> 
>  no one should expect more than 7
> 
> from any program or relay. the proper way
> 
> would seem to be html using char entity's
> 
> html appears to be no ones favorite format in email or usenet,
> 
> so let the flames begin.
> 
> I hope I haven't been hoodwinked into replying in 8bit as well.

Hmm, on reading and re-reading your points, the only way I can make
sense of them is if I assume that you didn't read the thread from the
start, which is highly recommended

http://tinyurl.com/hhhs

In summary:

1. I managed to make a greek word, using the original greek glyphs,
appear on everyone's "rendering surface", by posting a 7-bit clean XML
snippet. Another poster widened the software coverage even further by
posting a 7-bit clean HTML snippet. Both of our 7-bit markup snippets
travelled safely throughout the entirety of UseNet, including all the
7-bit relays and gateways.

2. The only other person who managed it, without using markup, was
Martin von Loewis, who is so good at this stuff that he confidently
makes statements like "what I did was right: it was Google that got it
wrong". Martin used the UTF-8 character set, i.e. a non-ASCII,
non-7-bit-clean character set, to achieve this. Although I'm sure
Martin could have managed it with UTF-7 as well.

3. If anybody else was willing to give it a try, they don't seem to
have had enough confidence in their knowledge of encodings, MIME,
transports, NNTP, etc, etc, to have actually hit the "send" button, in
case it didn't work. Which doesn't bode well for the average person in
the street: if the technology specialists in this newsgroup don't feel
in command of the issue, what hope for everyone else?

Maybe I should have a poke around the UseNet test groups to see how
many people tried and failed ;-)

-- 
alan kennedy
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