Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 8

From: "Peter Clark" <peter-clark@...>

>         This was the most popular poll thus far, with 38 responses (up 10
from our
> usual average). The results of the first question, "What encoding can your
> mail reader handle?" garnered the following responses:
>
>         A. Straight ASCII only. (2 responses, 5%)
>         B. ASCII and Latin-1. (16 responses, 42%)
>         C. ASCII and Unicode. (0 responses, 0%)
>         D. ASCII, Latin-1, and Unicode. (8 responses, 21%)
>         E. I can read just about anything you throw at me! (10 responses,
26%)
>         F. Other. (2 responses, 5%)
I didn't get to respond to this -- I have Outlook Express 6 running on
Windows XP Home, so my answer would be E (I might have to find a font for
something like, say, Ge'ez/Ethiopic), which would include not only Latin-1
and the Windows Western extensions between 128 and 159 decimal, but Latin-2,
Latin-3, Cyrillic, Greek, SJIS, Big Five, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, you name it. But
of course I'm in the minority here.

I do notice that almost everybody can read Latin-1. I was working on a type
of SAMPA/Kirshenbaum-type IPA alphabet for Latin-1 (not just ASCII) at one
time but never finished.

Why can't the two who can only read ASCII not read Latin-1, by the way?

>         If you want your email read in a text only environment; make it
readable.
> Same goes for diacritics. If you want to use them, and expect everybody to
> read them, make sure you send a plain text / diacritic free version. I
should
> say that I am _not_ disapproving of diacritics: Kerno uses them, but I
can't
> show them on Conlang because I can't use them via this terminal.
Or if you use Latin-1 characters, at least explain them in a sidenote, which
some of us are doing already. (Like saying "æ = ae ligature/ash", or "þ =
thorn/'th'".)

Something like UTF-8 Unicode should be reserved for HTML. Back in the days I
used Windows 3.1, however, I used a mixture of the Times Roman font with the
Symbol font, using Greek letters to represent sounds Latin could not, for an
early incarnation of the Tech alphabet, which then was based on Latin with
Greek additions.

>         As a side note, Yitzik Penzev mentioned: "Though some of
> us are able to receive Unicode encoded messages, I am not sure that e.g.
the
> server at Brown.edu can handle them. So we may keep it for correspondence
> out-of-list." Several others said much the same thing.
If we moved the list entirely to Yahoo! Groups, that would change; you could
also specify if you want posts to come to you as plain text or HTML. But of
course that's up to David and the owner(s).

>         The second question asked, "HTMLized mail: love it or hate it?"
>         A. My itchy delete finger pounces on any HTML mail with extreme
prejudice!
>         (11 responses, 29%)
>         B. I wish that people would send plain text only. (17 responses,
45%)
>         C. It doesn't bother me to get HTML messages. (6 responses, 16%)
>         D. I love HTML email! I can't stand plain text! (1 responses, 3%)
>         E. Other. (3 responses, 8%)
My answer is C (almost D), which REALLY places me in the minority....
Actually it depends on the type of e-mail. My dad and stepmother e-mail me
in HTML and I e-mail back in HTML. But true, e-mail lists with a high volume
should be kept to plain text, since my slowpoke dialup takes a while even to
download a hundred-ish plain text posts.

IF you feel the need to send HTML -- same goes for links to HTML
documents -- for God's sake keep things simple and the files small. And NO
COOKIES!!

>         David (DigitalScream@aol) gets bonus points for being funny with
his (E)
> answer: "What the hell is an HTML?  I understand it to be a voiceless
> pharyngeal fricative, followed by a voiceless interdental fricative,
followed
> by a high, back, unrounded, tense vowel, followed by a velar lateral of
some
> kind.  In fact, that could be a word in Arabic, almost...  In that case,
yes,
> I do like Arabic.  It was the first language I studied here at the
> university.  Nothing but fond memories..." Been reading too much
linguistic
> books lately?
LOL! That could be a word in Tech as well, but the initial H would require
an ultrashort vowel to follow (I ripped off the Hebrew rule of colored
schwas after laryngeals), so the word would have to be |hatml|.

~Danny~

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