🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4yyNVB4w165w@blues.kk.sub.org> kosta@blues.kk.sub.org (Kosta Kostis) writes:
>There is no way to mandate updates especially if there is no "need"
>for that. As long as we don't use 8-bit, nobody will ever change
>"faulty" software.

There is no way to mandate updates net-wide.  Period.  That is a fact
of life, like it or not.  If you decide to just charge ahead, unless
you have enough administrative control to force updates -- possible for
cooperating subnets, but nobody has such control net-wide -- then you
will spend years answering complaints from people whose software breaks.
Even long after you'd think everybody would have fixed it.  Believe me;
we've seen this with C News.

>> It will not be possible to forget about the bit-handicapped until their
>> numbers are vanishingly small.  That won't happen soon.
>
>I don't agree. It depends on us. Since the intro of VT 2xx terminals
>in 1983 nine years went by and many people are already equiped with
>8-bit terminals and PCs, Macs, NeXTs, Workstations of various brands
>now. All these are capable of displaying 8-bit characters.

"What do you mean 'we', white man?" -- Tonto, as the Apaches charge him
and the Lone Ranger. :-)  I don't have such a terminal.  Are you going to
buy me one?

You're not addressing the issue.  In the first place, the question is
not whether lots of people have 8-bit terminals -- they do -- but whether
many of the potential readers *don't*.  In the second place, the real
issue is transmission paths, not terminals:  the reader software can
look after inadequate terminals, but if the data goes through a 7-bit
keyhole (NNTP!) before it gets to you, no amount of intelligence in your
terminal will fix that.

And in the third place, most important, you're confusing encoding with
content.  MIME provides ways, *today*, to encode 8-bit or 16-bit or
32-bit character codes as 7-bit data that will pass through any of
the current transmission paths unscathed.  There is no need to wait
for 8-bit transmission paths to start using ISO 8859-1 (or, preferably,
10646 -- 8-bit provincialism is no better than 7-bit provincialism).
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry