Text 345, 29 rader
Skriven 2012-07-12 15:22:40 av mark lewis (1:3634/12.0)
    Kommentar till text 300 av Ardith Hinton (1:153/7715.0)
Ärende: .fidonet
================
 AH> Many years ago, Andy (founder of the ENGLISH_TUTOR echo) and I 
 AH> agreed to use IBMPC 2 because we could thus employ certain accent 
 AH> marks common to French, German, and English.  It didn't occur to 
 AH> either of us 'way back when that we might want to be able to read 
 AH> Russian, Swedish, and/or Norwegian at some time in the future.  
 AH> But hindsight is always 20/20....  ;-) 

very true... this is akin to something that a fidonet developer did way back
with one of the sysop editors when he started working on it after it went open
source... he whined and cried about having to watch for control phrases in the
middle of message text... said it slowed the message body processing down too
much... so, what's he do? he sorts all the control lines to the top... that
raises a nice stink... something else he did was to introduce and use <SOT> and
<EOT> controls... "Start of Text" and "End of Text"... there was nothing wrong
with the way things were already done but what he did broke future
functionality whereby we might be signalling a codepage or character set change
in the middle of a message... this could allow for the viewing of characters
like we see today in many internet applications... sure, those apps are using
UTF-8... ok, so they read the message and convert that section to the proper
UTF-8 character and then present it to the user for reading... conversion back
would be trickier but feasible... software that couldn't handle this would show
"garbage" like we see now anyway... but the point is that a developer who
couldn't or wouldn't play along with everyone else broke things that were
already capable of being done and actually, stuff that was already in testing
in some environments... oh well...

)\/(ark

 * Origin:  (1:3634/12)