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: Chris Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 01:10:26 -0800
- Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
email@hidden wrote:
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On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 13:41:46 -0800, Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
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proposed,
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> I filed an enhancement request a month or two back for 7-bit clean
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> AppleScript, i.e., nothing but pure ASCII. This whole list brouhaha was
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> the main reason, but there are others -- e.g., Mac OS X is supposed to
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> play nice in a multi-platform world, so relying on Mac encodings is not
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> a good idea.
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>
I think most of the gripes about the list would stop if it would just pass the
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ISO-8859-1 character set without problems. ...
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>
Yes, if someone is stuck with a 7-bit mail program, he or she will have a
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problem. But the vast majority of people on this list who use a MIME-aware
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mailer and send their messages MIME'ed and quoted-printable encoded shouldn't
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have their correct characters mangled by the list server.
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>
As a larger issue, I applaud an ISO-8859-1 clean AppleScript. OS X, cross
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platform, and all that. But that doesn't mean we need a 7-bit clean
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representation.
Good points, but like I said, the mailing list is not my only concern [1]. Stupid
servers will probably be around forever, and with Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings,
the likelihood of exposure to old and ASCII-centric software -- server and
otherwise -- is greatly increased. For example, neither emacs nor vi know how to
display non-ASCII characters in any readable form [2]. Yes, you could argue that
people who use such things are throwbacks, but you'd be suprised how many of them
there are [3].
The practical argument is that if I'm going to change the character set at all,
it's nearly as much work to make it fit into ISO-8859-1 as it is into ASCII, so why
not go all the way?
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
[1] If it were, I'd probably just hassle Chuq. :)
[2] At least not the out-of-the-box versions on Mac OS X. I'm sure emacs has some
spiffy option somewhere to change its behavior, and even if it didn't I could build
my own version that did, but that's a lot of work to throw at people when I can fix
the problem at the source.
[3] I'm a regular vi user, myself. No, I don't hate emacs with the fire of a
thousand suns, I just happened to learn vi first.