Re: Design to fail.

In article
<84086bc2-8182-4292-bb12-ad82ee763331@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
andrelieven@xxxxxxxx (Andre Lieven) wrote:
On Jan 8, 10:56 pm, Sean O'Hara <seanoh...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Andre Lieven wrote:
So, the real problem is YOUR Thunderbird program. Got it.
No, the problem is that you should never post to English-language
Usenet groups using a non-Roman character-set, and preferably
without using any diacritical marks. Ever.
Try that in plain English. I've said that I'm using Google Groups.

In plain english, the meaning is "If you want to be readily understood
in English-language groups, post using the basic US-English character
set".

No accented characters, no foreign-language characters, no currency
symbols apart from the basic $ sign, no fractions, no ligatures, no
dashes apart from the basic hyphen. If you can type it without using
fancy codes or lots of modifier keys on a basic US/Canadian English-
language keyboard you should be fine.

The reason for this comparatively stone-age system is that the actual
standards for Usenet are also fairly stone-age. The limitations I
describe above are a layman's approximation to "ASCII", which stands for
"American Standard Code for Information Interchange", which describes a
very basic set of characters and the codes to be used to display them,
to be used as a common standard for moving text between different kinds
of computer. That is what Usenet was defined to use.

There is a problem in that many, many tools that you can use to access
Usenet will use different and fancier methods of encoding characters
that can cope with a larger range of characters. There are a lot of
these methods, and their mutual compatibility is poor. This program I'm
using, for example, will use the extra characters that Microsoft Windows
defines. These are not the same as the ones that are defined by Mac OS
X; there are probably several different sets of extensions that you can
use on Linux (I don't know for sure), and so on. Also, many programs are
confused about what they actually use, and label text as something
different to what it really is. It's a complicated sub-field of
programming, and it isn't getting any easier with time.

Since Google Groups is web-orientated, I think it uses the web's
standards for representing character sets. There are a lot of these, and
they're quite confusing, so different programs sometimes interpret the
standards differently. That's basically what the problem was with
Thunderbird. And many news reader programs won't display HTML properly,
or at all. This one is amongst the latter, and I keep it partly because
of that, because that makes it absolutely immune to several categories
of "malware" - hostile software, some of which has been, in the past,
embedded in HTML.

Why has this terrible situation come into existence? Because so many
companies think it's preferable to try to enforce their standard on the
world than comply with other people's. It is certainly less up-front
programming work; all it takes is a certain amount of self-deception
about the chances of success. Google are not blameless in this respect,
although Microsoft are worse. If you want a route to straighten it out,
that might actually work, I'd suggest acquiring control of a large
nuclear arsenal and holding the world to ransom. Legislation won't touch
it, because police forces have better things to do than enforce it.
Telling everyone "it would all be fine if you use Google Groups" won't
work, because compared to a good Usenet reader, Google Groups, in my
experience, is like using braille; far harder, and terribly slow. If
it were the only available route, I'd give up Usenet.

--
John Dallman, jgd@xxxxxxxxx, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
.

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