Re: Admin: a suggestion on the script corruption problem.
Re: Admin: a suggestion on the script corruption problem.
- Subject: Re: Admin: a suggestion on the script corruption problem.
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 00:06:00 -0500
On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 13:41:46 -0800, Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
proposed,
>
I filed an enhancement request a month or two back for 7-bit clean
>
AppleScript, i.e., nothing but pure ASCII. This whole list brouhaha was
>
the main reason, but there are others -- e.g., Mac OS X is supposed to
>
play nice in a multi-platform world, so relying on Mac encodings is not
>
a good idea.
I think most of the gripes about the list would stop if it would just pass the
ISO-8859-1 character set without problems. Our two biggest problems are the
line continuation character (¬, ¬, or U+00AC) and guillemets (angle
quotes or "chevrons", «, «, or U+00AB and », », or
U+00BB). Make these come through and the whining will stop.
Of the characters that have special meaning in AppleScript, I can identify just
three that are only available in the Mac character set: "not equals", "less than
or equal to", and "greater than or equal to". Yes, there are characters that
don't have the same encoding on the Mac as in ISO-8859-1, but MIME and the
quoted-printable already are the standard way to protect these characters.
I'm not sure what the MIME capability of every e-mail clients is out there, but
people who are cutting scripts out of their Script Editor window and pasting
them into their mailer window are pretty well served by the MIME standard, even
if they aren't aware of it. The people who have the least ability to specially
encode their scripts, and decode mangled scripts, are the new users. The ones
with a new mailer programs.
Yes, if someone is stuck with a 7-bit mail program, he or she will have a
problem. But the vast majority of people on this list who use a MIME-aware
mailer and send their messages MIME'ed and quoted-printable encoded shouldn't
have their correct characters mangled by the list server.
As a larger issue, I applaud an ISO-8859-1 clean AppleScript. OS X, cross
platform, and all that. But that doesn't mean we need a 7-bit clean
representation.
--
Scott Norton Phone: +1-703-299-1656
DTI Associates, Inc. Fax: +1-703-706-0476
2920 South Glebe Road Internet: email@hidden
Arlington, VA 22206-2768 or email@hidden