A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Ben Finney]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 00:33:38 +0200, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> So what do you think about this message?:
> ????????

I think it looks like a series of identical question marks.  Presumably
you wrote it using a character set my terminal isn't using, and you had
no way of instructing my computer to use.

Even if you could, it's folly to assume that my computer has a font
containing the character set you used.

The only characters you know are in my computer's fonts are the
printable ASCII characters (ASCII 32-126).  Anything else is a minefield
of disparate character sets, font mappings and incomplete implementations.

Beyond that, even if I could read your message, it's even greater folly
to assume that I have some way of responding in kind, or of searching
for those characters.  I have no obvious way to generate them.

I'm not sure what Alan Kennedy's point is, but the current state of
play, while improving, does not allow for a universal way of generating,
displaying and searching international character sets.

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