On Monday December 09 2013 10:38, you wrote to me:
MvdV>> Some others will see the characters properly displayed on their MvdV>> screen, some will see garbage, depending on their MvdV>> configuration. Either way they will be able to copy and paste MvdV>> the names, but they will not know how to pronounce them.
ml> and when the letters are pasted, they are very likely to be mangled
Fidonet is an 8 bit transparent medium. It is agnostic with respect to the character encoding schemes deployded in messages. If names are mangled up it is because of poorly configured or designed end user software.
ml> i see it way too many times here when i try to paste stuff ml> from the internet into documents... in many cases, i have to resort to ml> another method of gathering the information...
I rarely have problems. Maybe it is because I have been dealing with languages other than US English for well over half a century end hence dealt with alphabets other than the US ASCII character set. Or maybe it is because the Internet has seen the light and moved mostly to UTF-8 and all text processing software other than stone age stuff can handle that. Even my stone age WIN98 can deal with it...
Their was a time when we were satisfied with 0-9 and capitals A-Z only. If we were to reason like you we would still be writing on ASR33 teletypes in capitals only.
But the world has moved on and not only has the capitals only rule been broken, so has the US ASCII only rule.
Let me ask yo this: "Do you think it is fair that you and I, can have our names in the nodelist exactly as it is spelled in our native language and that Björn and Alexey can not"? Is that fair? Is that treating everyone as equal? Considering that the technical issues that imposed those restrained have long ago been solved in the world outside Fidonet?
