From: telcontar@duck.com   
      
   On 26.12.2022 at 22:01, DanS scribbled:   
      
   > Aragorn  wrote in   
   > news:20221220174017.1c088c34@nx-74205:    
   >    
   > > On 20.12.2022 at 08:17, Mike Easter scribbled:   
   > >      
   > >> Mike Easter wrote:     
   > >> > Aha.  Claws default is 7bit ascii; if you put in an   
   > >> > em-dash, it is going to have to deal w/ that somehow.       
   > >>    
   > >> Actually claws default charset is 'auto' which it uses   
   > >> ascii unless it needs something else, which alternately   
   > >> could be utf-8 but utf-8 won't do an em-dash w/o 'extras'   
   > >> so it uses q-p.      
   > >    
   > > I use UTF-8 everywhere.  It's the 21st century, after all,   
   > > and I'm not an American. :p     
   >    
   > I don't know how the 'Americans' here don't call you out on your   
   > elitism.   
      
   I don't consider aligning myself with something the whole world has   
   agreed upon, accepted and adopted more than two decades ago as   
   any kind of elitism. As the matter of fact, I'd say that refusing to   
   adopt such globally accepted standards out of a misplaced sense of   
   nationalism would be a lot closer to elitism.  And arrogance.   
      
   > I don't know if it's the European in you, or your issues,   
   > probably a combination, but...   
      
   My "issues", eh?  Yes, why not go ad hominem?  You've always been so   
   very good at that.   
      
   Could the fact that you're still holding grudges against me after, what   
   was it now, 10 or 12 years since we kicked your Microsoft fanboy ass   
   around these parts, possibly be an indication of any issues that YOU   
   might have?   
      
   Don't answer that.  It was a rhetorical question.   
      
   > ...joking or not...it's uncalled for.   
      
   It was not a reference to Americans themselves, but to the fact that   
   ASCII and ISO-8859-1 were specifically created to cover the English   
   language — i.e. the Latin alphabet, possibly with a few diacritics   
   added — as used in the USA, and that despite the fact that the Euro (€)   
   as a currency has already been in use for 20 years, many American   
   websites and email providers are still using ISO-8859-1 as their   
   character encoding, even though said encoding doesn't even cover the   
   Euro symbol, let alone any other languages than the Western-European   
   ones.    
      
   In fact, a variant of ISO-8859-1 encoding was created — ISO-8859-15 —   
   which does include the Euro symbol, but even then still, Americans tend   
   to stick to ISO-8859-1, let alone going with Unicode, which covers all   
   that's covered in the different ISO encodings, and although different   
   varieties of Unicode exist, they are all upward compatible with one   
   another.  UTF-8 covers all of the western languages, UTF-16 covers   
   all of the same things as UTF-8 plus bidirectional script, and so on.   
      
   In a way, I liken this conservative trend to stick with ISO-8859-1 to   
   the American refusal to adopt the metric system, even though everyone   
   else in the world has adopted the metric system and actively uses it,   
   in the spirit of international cooperation and trade.    
      
   And yes, I'm aware that the USA recognizes the metric system, but   
   actually adopting it is still a very different thing.   
      
   The bottom line is that as a European, ISO-8859-1 and ASCII do not   
   cover my needs, nor those of the people in the rest of the world.   
      
   --    
   With respect,   
   = Aragorn =   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)