Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 01:55, Guy Dunphy via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Also I have it configured to
> dust-bin any incomimg mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of time-wasting.

That's English-language cultural snobbery. I'm a native Anglophone but
I live in a non-English speaking country, Czechia.

For example, right now, I am in my office in Křižíkova. I can't type
that name correctly without Unicode characters, because the ANSI
character set doesn't contain enough letters for Czech. It can cope
with some Western European letters needed for Spanish, French etc.,
but not even enough for the Norwegian letter ``ø''. So I can type the
name of the district of Prague I'm in -- Karlín -- and you'll probably
see that, but the street name, I am guessing not.

"Krizikova" is usually close enough but it's not correct. Those
letters are important. E.g. "sýrové" means cheesy, but "syrové" means
raw. That's a significant difference. It matters to me and I'm not
even Czech and don't speak it particularly well...

So if you tried to mail me something at work -- the address I normally
use, for instance for the Alphasmart Dana Wireless on the way to to me
from Baltimore right now -- and you get a reply saying "package for
[streetname] undeliverable" in the subject -- you'd just reject it.

That's basically discriminating against people who don't speak your
language, and in my book, that's not OK.

> Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough.

Look, we haven't even been able to get him to quote correctly, so I
suspect changing his typing habits is right out!

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053