Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Grant Taylor]

On 11/23/18 4:12 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> That's English-language cultural snobbery.

I don't think I'd go that far.

I'd suspect it's an unfortunate false positive of a spam filtering 
technique that Guy uses.

Does the technique have some negative side effects?  Sure.

Are said side effects intentional?  I doubt it.

> I'm a native Anglophone but I live in a non-English speaking country, 
> Czechia.

I bet you see all sorts of things that I'm ignorant of.

> 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.

Intriguing.  Is there an old MS-DOS Code Page (or comparable technique) 
that does encompass the necessary characters?

> 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.

Would you please provide an example?  (I'm curious if my email client 
will display things properly.)  Feel free to pick any example that you 
like so that you don't have to reveal information you might want to keep 
private.

> "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.

Oh my.  I had no idea that accent characters made such a difference. But 
I consider that to be my personal ignorance living in the U.S.A.  I do 
NOT think it's anybody's fault by my own.  I'll defend others if someone 
tries to say that their native / local regional norm is the problem.

> It matters to me and I'm not even Czech and don't speak it particularly 
> well...

Fair enough.

> 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.

I will say that I think everybody has their own individual prerogative 
to filter email as they see fit.  They just need to know that they are 
doing and own the fact that they might be causing unintentional harm.

P.S.  Resending from the correct email address.  —  A recent Thunderbird 
update broke the Correct-Identity add-on.  :-(



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die