Re: Conlang book - please include Vya:a:h

> X-Sender: dstarner98@mail.ofe.org
> Date:         Sat, 19 May 2001 00:48:36 -0500
> From: David Starner <dstarner98@...>
>
> At 11:54 AM 05/18/2001 +0000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> >The lowest common denominator for email is still plain ISO 8859-1.
>
> The lowest common denominator for email has been, is, and probably
> will be for a long time, ASCII. ISO 8859-1 can't be viewed by any one
> using mail program in a terminal set to a non-ISO 8859-1 character set,
> and Mutt running in a UTF-8 terminal frequently chokes on unmarked
> ISO 8859-1 text from this list.
True, in principle.

However, the number of systems in existence that can actually read
internet mail _and_ cannot be set to show iso-8859-1 correctly, is
very very small. Even VMS has mail readers that will handle it now.

It's been a few years since anyone's had complaints based on that, and
I think that was someone at a Japanese university whose IT department
had locked the mail readers into JIS-xxx mode.

I'd be very surprised if anything that will show UTF-8 won't also show
Latin 1 just fine if you tell it to. And if you insist on running Mutt
in an xterm set to UTF-8, you'll just have to patch Mutt.

But I agree that it's a problem that so many people persist in sending
iso8859-1 (or even CP 1252) and not marking it (or even marking it as
US-ASCII). Same goes for pretending that CP 1252 is ISO-8859-1.

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

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