From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.future
Subject: Re: Newsreader supporting MIME
Date: 10 Nov 92 06:39:27 GMT
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada

In article <1992Nov9.143345.18466@infodev.cam.ac.uk> rf@cl.cam.ac.uk (Robin Fairbairns) writes:
>In article <1992Nov9.132448.26542@rdg.dec.com>, kostis@frsmic.enet.dec.com (Kosta Kostis) writes:
>|> In article <3949@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca>, clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes...

>|> >>>minor benefit of being 8-bit clean.

>|> >>It may be a minor benefit for you, but it's not minor for people outside
>|> >>the english speaking community - and that's the majority in the world.

>|> >This may well be true, but irrelevant - something like 80% of the people
>|> >on the net are in the USA.

>|> Irrelevant? I'd call that ignorance! There are much less US citizens in
>|> the world than let's say european. Did you ever notice that?  8-)
>|> And the Internet, especially in europe is growing real fast - I'd guess
>|> faster than the US part of it. Maybe it won't take much time and less
>|> than 50% of the people on the net reside in the USA.  ;-)
>|> Nah, it *will* take some time - but we're coming...  8-)

>I was irritated by the post, too; but we have to recognise that the
>USA does constitute overwhelmingly the largest part of the net, just
>now.

If you agree with what I said, what's there to be irritated with?  I
was merely pointing out the reality of the situation.  Getting the Americans
off their duff is a major undertaking.

>The way to solve this problem is not to slag off the American
>mentality (which isn't as bad as you suggest) 

Oh, you're another person who thinks I'm American.  Note my
Organization line.

>but to do positive
>things such as Brad Templeton suggests - new services that require

Brad being a fellow Canadian ;-) (recently expatriate)

>8-bit cleanliness.  If people find that they need a new service, they
>will be far more likely than otherwise to go through the pain of
>re-installing their news system.

But it will still take time.  That's what I was saying.

>|>             UUCP-software for the Atari ST (HERMES) has a converter
>|> already build in. Amigas use ISO 8859-1 by definition (native character set).
>|> Converters for Macs shouldn't be that much of a problem...
>|> At least some X/Windows fonts do support ISO 8859-1.

>|> All I'm asking for, is that those who need 8 Bits to encode theirs mails
>|> and articles should be given the chance to do that. The transport mechanisms
>|> have allways been 8 Bit channels - just RFC 821/822 invented the cripeling.

>|> I think I better worry about people that are convinced there's no way to
>|> change things (in a chaotic network)... =;^)

>There _is_ a way to change.  The facts you give above indicate that
>8859-1 is starting to percolate through the community.  [How fast it
>will permeate in the face of the more complicated ISO 10646/Unicode,
>which includes 8859-1, is an interesting question.]

Well, how about this?:  I'm a member of the Canadian POSIX working group,
formulating the Canadian position (and vote) on the POSIX 1003.x standards.
8859-1 is absolutely essential for Canada (French accents), and we've
been spending most of our time trying to fix some internationalization
botches in 1003.1 and .2, ie: PAX file name character sets.  It was
Canada's lobbying that led to the final 10646/Unicode/8859-1 accord.

Or: I'm the author of psroff, a set of troff filters - I went so far
as to kludge old CAT troff into supporting 8859-1.  (And I hope
to get it working perfectly next patch ;-)

Or: I was one of the people contributing to AT&T's decision to finally
make DWB troff 8 bit clean and support 8859-1.

Does *that* sound like "American-USASCII-arrogance"?

>I simply maintained (in my original post in this thread) that change
>is not something that will come easily.

That's all that I was saying.  We agreed.  And then you think I'm American.
That's not very nice ;-)

>|> sw-authors: please support ISO 8859-1   dv|DV\_=aeoeueAEOEUEss

I do!  I do!

>Hear! hear!  

I did.
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Psroff 3.0 info: psroff-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
Ferret list: ferret-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
Newsgroups: news.future