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A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

Alan Kennedy alanmk at hotmail.com
Fri Jul 18 15:25:20 EDT 2003 
Alan Kennedy

>> More worrying however is the failure of modern browsers to display
>> the characters when accessed through Google Groups.

Martin v. Löwis:

> It's not the browsers that display it incorrectly; it is Google
> rendering it incorrectly. Fortunately, they keep the original data
> at
>
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3F172442.2040907%40v.loewis.de&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain

Thanks Martin, a virtuoso demonstration.

It is also worth noting that your message and messages quoting it are
the only hits that turn up in a Google Groups search using the
original greek text as a search term: i.e. I go to Google Groups and
paste in the greek letters. This is true of both "global" Google
Groups and the Greek version as well:

groups.google.com:    http://tinyurl.com/hd58
groups.google.com.gr: http://tinyurl.com/hd5l

Bravo! (These kudos exchangable for food+beers should you ever decide
to visit Dublin :-)

To everyone else: Why does this stuff get so complicated? Why does it
take a multi-lingual + encoding-guru + protocol-guru + markup-guru +
python-bot like Martin von L to get stuff like this done? Does it have
to require somebot who writes better quality software (i.e. less
defective) than the world's leading search engine, Google, who got it
slightly wrong?

The idea of raising this came to me when that Russian individual
posted a message a few days ago that got very garbled in the
transmission, both subject and content. Again, it was only Martin who
was able to figure out its content: I, being an ordinary mortal, was
left saying "¿Qué?"

Computers should be about making it easier for people to communicate
with each other. And yes I fully realise python's excellence in that
regard, thanks in large part to Martin.

To me, the "structure data using ASCII" argument seems very similar to
the human language position: "English is now universal, therefore all
people must learn and speak it if they want to communicate." What if I
want to have an irish gaelic word in the subject line of my emails or
usenet posts?

slán libh,

--
aláin ó cinnéide
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