--- Me <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > people on the list who can't be bothered to read > > the documentation for their own keyboard IO system. > > Most of this discussion seems to focus on keyboarding. > But that's of little consequence. This will always be > spotted before it does much harm and will affect just > one person and their software at a time.
Good. Counting Damian, that makes three of us. Welcome aboard, ralph. :-) > Errors in encoding during transmission is a whole lot > more problematic. This will almost always be spotted > after the fact, and may affect many people at a time > and require fixes to multiple systems not controlled > by the sender or receiver. I disagree (slightly). I get emailed powerpoint files, jpeg images, and tens of other binary formats every day, and they consistently come through correctly. The transmission network is working fine. What we've got is an encoding problem at the MUA level. Mark Reed says my mailer (Yahoo!) tagged a message containing high-bit characters as US-ASCII. Several people the other day reported on the differences in UTF8 vs. Latin-1 handling among pine, elm, and other mailers. There are problems, and this kind of change will create a demand to get them fixed. Those products that satisfy the demand will survive. The others won't. Up until now, though, everyone's been lax about making the encoding stuff strack. But this is a language widely regarded as a huge player, and when a huge player says "You need to take care of (something)", then it gets done. Perl6 will do more to address the real technical issues of electronic communication between Americans and French-speakers than anything else. (Primarily because Perl hackers want to talk to each other, but no French-speaker wants to talk to an American ;-) =Austin __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/
