"TimS"  wrote

| >     No. I can only read English. I only write English.
| > It's of no value to see characters in languages I
| > can't read, even if I have the font. The nice thing
| > about not displaying in UTF-8 is that I don't have
| > to see emojis. I can just write a cranky not back
| > to people saying that I only see boxes. That usually
| > cures them of emoji mania. :)
|
| You're obviously making life too easy for yourself. Why not just junk all
this
| useful software nonsense, and read the bits directly off the disk. All you
| need is a bar magnet, a magnifying glass, and some fine iron filings.
| Simples!
|
   :) This seems to really get your goat. If you'll recall,
all I said was that UTF-8 was a good choice because
for English-speaking people and most webpages it was
an invisible transition. That might not be politically
correct, but it's true.

  If you're on Linux and text files default to UTF-8 then
that's handy. You'll never need to know that the encoding
is not ASCII/ANSI. Since all my text files and HTML files are
essentially ASCII, I convert any UTF-8 I get to that.
For me UTF-8 is only corrupted text data.

  For many people, UTF-8 is a great solution. That's fine.
But if you're going to send me funky characters for no reason,
in English, in a text-based medium, I see no reason to figure
out how to decipher it... And imagine my dismay at going to the
trouble only to find that someone has sent me 4 crying faces,
3 piles of shit, and an umbrella... or is that a soccer ball?
Or that they're trying to show off by sending some ditty in
Turkish or Russian... I still don't know what it means. I can't
read Turkish and Russian.

  And what the heck does 4 crying faces and 3 piles of
shit and an umbrella mean? The sender is having a tantrum?
They've eaten too many prunes? They hate shitting? Or maybe
it's an inside joke. Maybe that's Beyonce's famous signature?
Sort of a "proud to be cranky" gimmick? Maybe it's Taylor
Swift's official breakup note? Maybe the sender is signalling
their fondness for some foul tempered rock star?

  Who knows? It's
hardly an articulate expression. I pretty much ignore
emojis, anyway, for that reason. I usually don't know
what they mean. I just figured out that what I thought
was a corncob is probably "anjali" -- praying hands. So...
what?... a hippie is writing to me and they've developed
that irritating behavioral tic of bowing to express false
humility? ... Or maybe it really is a corncob. Beats me.
I need UTF-8 so that I can see such crap? I don't think so.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05