On Saturday, October 20, 2001, at 09:13 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Dare I say it? Another reason to use just 7-bit ASCII.
I'm not particularly religious on this issue, but for text-based discussions like the ones we have here, anything else just doesn't seem necessary, and can lead to strange results like what we just saw.
-Declan
On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 04:13:19PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
Above mistranslates ISO-8859-1 encoded \260 (octal), the degree sign, as a zero.
Temperatures should read 220 F, 270 F, and 280 F, not thousands of degrees.
As Declan says, and as many of us have said, there are _abundant_ reasons to try to stick to 7-bit ASCII on mailing lists and on Usenet. It's not surprising to me that it is Karsten M. Self, whom I had to killfile, is quoted above in this issue. He was always complaining that posts should be "formatted for legibility," via his nags and reposts, but then he has MIME encrustations on his posts. As for the "degrees" issue, confusion about the symbol was one of the reasons the scientific community abandoned use of the symbol at least 30 years ago. 212 F and 100 C are the accepted ways of reporting temperature...the degree symbol was redundant anyway and led to typesetting problems. --Tim May --Tim May "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." --John Stuart Mill