Re: OT: Re: Why do people in the UK put a u in the word color?
On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 08:23:11PM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 April 2006 11:44, Digby Tarvin wrote:
>
> > If you want your message to be understood by people that are not using
> > graphical applications to read their email then it is best to stick to
> > ASCII text.
> >
> > I am in the UK, but I never try to use shift-3 to insert a pound symbol
> > into an email, because I know that not everyone uses a compatable character
> > set.
>
> But the character set is defined by the header. If your system can't
> determine and display the right character set, it's time to go spend $40 for
> an old 486, a Debian CD and some lunch.
>
> Besides, it's a very reasonable expectation for anybody on an English speaking
> list to be using ISO-Latin-1, Latin-15, UTF8 or ASCII, which save for ASCII
> have everything in common for the characters I know how to type.
I will agree that it is very reasonable to assume the ASCII character set
is available, but it is not reasonable to assume ISO-Latin-1 or Latin-15,
because English language lists are read by many people for whom English
is a second Language. Most educated people in China or Russia would have
to be able to deal with english to take full advantage of the Internet,
but would probably have their locale set appropriately for the languages
they are likely to have to read in personal emails.
If you are using a graphical display, then UTF provides a good way to
avoid the problem if your mail reading software can do the translation.
But I don't think you can assume everyone on a public mailing list is
going to have that.
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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