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computers / alt.folklore.computers / Re: New Year's Computer Stories...

SubjectAuthor
* New Year's Computer Stories...Johnny Billquist
`- New Year's Computer Stories...Ahem A Rivet's Shot

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Re: New Year's Computer Stories...

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From: bqt@softjar.se (Johnny Billquist)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: New Year's Computer Stories...
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:25:24 +0100
Organization: MGT Consulting
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 by: Johnny Billquist - Sat, 28 Jan 2023 23:25 UTC

On 2023-01-27 08:13, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2023 22:05:35 +0100
> Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>
>> On 2023-01-25 19:19, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>> On Wed, 25 Jan 2023 17:13:26 +0000
>>> "Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:
>>>
>>>> TL;DR - it's a mess.
>>>
>>> But it's the least awful available solution to international
>>> text encoding.
>>
>> Well, it's the only one, and it's unlikely we'll see any other. It's
>
> Nah, we had international text encoding before Unicode, with all
> the iso-8859 8 bit codes, the DOS code pages and WIN-12* 8 bit codes along
> with several dozen wider encodings such as shift-JIS and of course HTML
> and XML entities. All you had to do was encode each script separately and
> keep track of which encoding you were using for which text at all times.

If you consider a coding which actually don't tell what it encodes
without additional meta-data as an international text encoding. I think
I do not.

> Unicode is way less awful than that mess.

Well, truth be told, the way Unicode turned out, I would have preferred
staying with 8859-xyzzy and have additional meta-data to tell which
encoding was used.

But that's not happening. And the amount of encodings possible with any
8859 variant is really not close to enough to cover all needs. And noone
is adding any more.

Johnny

Re: New Year's Computer Stories...

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From: steveo@eircom.net (Ahem A Rivet's Shot)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: New Year's Computer Stories...
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2023 04:57:42 +0000
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 by: Ahem A Rivet's - Sun, 29 Jan 2023 04:57 UTC

On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:25:24 +0100
Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:

> Well, truth be told, the way Unicode turned out, I would have preferred
> staying with 8859-xyzzy and have additional meta-data to tell which
> encoding was used.

Throw in all the other encodings for CJK scripts etc. too and then
remember that the meta data and text can and will get separated even
assuming the meta data is correct which it often isn't.

One of the problems we had with the Yahoo! news feed was WIN-1252
text being supplied when the meta data said ISO-8859-1 - WIN-1252 has
printable characters where ISO-8859-1 has control characters but is
otherwise almost identical, there are similar WIN/ISO mismatches for the
other scripts too.

The upshot of this discovery was some horrible heuristic code in
the path from live news feed to web page that tries to guess the the correct
encoding when the text is invalid under the declared encoding. All that
because someone wanted to print a Euro sign and couldn't get the meta data
right.

So I disagree - *any* universal encoding no matter how messed up by
politics and bike shedding is an infinite improvement over the chaos of
metadata and an ever expanding mess of encodings none of which cover
everything making some forms of mixed text completely impossible. The
ability to take a string of bytes and display it as text in a form
guaranteed to match the original intent is *priceless*.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

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