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 Message 878 
 Michiel van der Vlist to Bj”rn Felten 
 The seven-bit restriction 
 03 Feb 14 16:48:53 
 
Hello Bj”rn,

On Monday February 03 2014 16:45, you wrote to All:

 BF> Just out of curiosity: why in Heavens Name are you keeping the
 BF> seven-bit restriction in the program?

It doesn't. For some time now - on my suggestion - it supports this option:

Allow8bit 1

 BF>    Check out the listing of 2:203/6 to see what little progress we
 BF> have made for soon to be 15 years. I've had that listing, properly
 BF> spelled, for many years now, and I'm still just Bj?rn in the nodelist
 BF> there... :(

There is just one little problem. Just as the ASCII only restriction is not
fair to the world outside the part where the native US English speakers live,
it would not be fair to restrict it to those that can spell their name or city
properly in CP437, CP850 or LATIN-1.

I we allow more than ASCII, we should allow ALL Fidonet participants to have
their name properly spelled. Unfortunately there is no single 8 bit character
set that can fulfil this requirement, and having a different character
encoding scheme for each line is ehh.. unpractical.

The only thing that makes sense is to use UTF-8. That means the ” in you name
will be encoded by two bytes in the nodelist.

When I see TWO questions marks in the nodelist for 2:203/6, we can discuss
this again.


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MINGW 1.1.5-b20110320
 * Origin: http://www.vlist.eu (2:280/5555)

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