A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Brian McErlean]

Alan Kennedy <alanmk at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<3F17C1D4.1A70703A at hotmail.com>...
> "Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
> 
> > So what do you think about this message?:
> > 
> > γίγνÏ?Ï?κÏ?
> > 
> > Look Ma, no markup. And not every character uses two bytes, either.
> > And I can use Umlauts (äöü) and Arabic (ء�ﻣ.��ﺮﺷ)
> > if I want to.
> 
> Martin,
> 
> I can see from other people's messages that this has been successful
> for some people with modern software.
> 
> However, it failed for me on my old Netscape 4.x Messenger. Which is
> acceptable, I suppose, because I intentionally use ancient email and
> usenet software. It is also worth noting that although my poor old
> usenet client failed to display the sequence of characters, the
> "Navigator" component to which it belongs correctly displayed the
> greek text when fed Bengt's "gignooskoo.html" file (although it failed
> on my xml snippet).
> 
> More worrying however is the failure of modern browsers to display the
> characters when accessed through Google Groups.
> 
> >http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=3F172442.2040907%40v.loewis.de
> 
> I tried to view this in IE6.0 and Netscape 6.2, and all I saw was 
> "?????s??".
> 
> Whereas that thread still shows my XML snippet intact, still
> copy&paste-able.
> 
> kind regards,

I saw the same as you with that URL, but viewing the thread in google,
or going to the link it gave for "View this article only":
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=3F172442.2040907%40v.loewis.de

displayed OK (Using Mozilla firebird 0.6)

The key difference seems to be the "oe=UTF-8" argument in the URL. 
Adding this to your URL displays it correctly.