Hello Henri,

On Thursday May 30 2019 16:06, you wrote to me:

 HD>>>>> At this moment I donot like the UTF 8 circus.

 MvdV>> "Onbekend maakt onbemind".

 HD> That's not the problem,

I think it is for at least a part. You obviously did not know that ASCII is a
subset of UTF-8. The part about "unknown" is certainly true.

 HD> but that it does not work at my favorite machine,

Your favourite machine is 30 years old. How long can you expect the rest of
Fidonet to hold back because you want to hold on to three decades old stuff? If
all of mankind had that attitude, there would not have been a mankind. We'd
never have left the sea and still be fish.

 MvdV>> In Dutch the accents and tremas are essential.

 HD> You can often read that from the context,

And sometimes one can not.

 HD> so accents not always necessarry.

"not always" != "never".

There is also the reading experience. The eye also wants its share. Text with
proper accentuation and punctuation is much more pleasent to read than the bare
minimum where one has to guess what is meant exactly.

 HD>  Many people use them in the wrong way too, or do not use
 HD> them at all.

That's no excuse. Just as it is no excuse that some people do not espect red
lights.

 MvdV>> "Een" and "‚‚n" mean different things.

 HD> You can write e'e'n in stead, no special apostrophes needed ;-).

I can, but it looks awfull. Plus that if I need to encase it in quotes, reading
becomes a parsing contest: 'e'e'n'. Can you parse "'e'e'n'"?

 MvdV>> "Roel" and "Ro‰l" are not the same person.

 HD> You can write Ro"el, no special apostrophes needed ;-).

I can write it. In the sense that with some effort I can push the required keys
in my keyboard. But when I see "Ro"el" I have to think very hard to extract the
meaning. Plus that search algoritms will not work with this encoding. Googling
"Ro‰l" and "Ro"el" give very different results.

 HD> At the basis school I learned that the trema means a split before the
 HD> character it is placed on. So Ro"el is correct and Roe"l is
 HD> wrong.

So you say. But my guess is that that is just your opinion and not fact learned
at school. When I learned to read at school there were no computers ans ASCII
did not exist yet. Dutch typewrites could deal witg accents and tremas in the
proper way. Encodeing ano with trema as the sequence ""o" or "o"" was totally
unheard of. Yiu are younger than me,abiou at decade, but I do not think you
learned this abberant encoding in elementary school,

 HD>  Other point is the points on the i with a trema. There should
 HD> be three of them not two, because the letter i already has one of its
 HD> own. The trema is an extra 2 points, so in total 3. A good typewriter
 HD> does this write well, i.e. which all the three points.

If you say so. I have never seen such a typewriter. If an ‹ is created by
overstriking it may result in three dots above. I would not say that therefore
it is correct. Language is not logic, it follows its own rules. The convention
is two dots over the i.

 HD>  That's why I am allways talking about the Point(s) on the i ;-).

Then put your money where your moyh is and TYPE an '¡' with three dots above.
;-)

 HD> The Duth "y with dots are mostly spelled as two characters "ij"

That is not how I learned it in elementary school. On Roggeveen's  "Aap, noot
mies" leesplankje yje "ij" in "Gijs" was one letter:

https://www.knutselstore.nl/diamond-painting/diamond-painting-aap-noot-mies-40x
60/

And that is how I learned to write it. ONE letter, written without lifting the
pen from the paper. Writing it as a the digraph 'ij' was a consession to
internationalisation when the market was flooded with foreign typewriters not
supporting the Dutch concatenated 'ij'

 HD>  In Germany they do the same by placing a letter e behind
 HD> vowels with an Umlaut, nothing wrong with that.

Waht is wring wit it, is that it only works for Germany. In Dutch it does not
wok because most of those combinations are already "taken". "ae" "ie" "ee" and
"oe" are already tekan.

 MvdV>> And than of course there are languages with a completely
 MvdV>> different alfabet, Greek and Russian come to mind.

 HD> That is a far from my bed show,

Yet there are EU countries were Cyrillic is the alfabet for the native
Language. North Macedonia and Bulgaria come to mind. It is not all that far.
You can het there in your own car without needing a passport.

 HD> I have not the energy for to learn.

Pity. But you can't bocj the rest of Fidonet just because of that...

 MvdV>> Bj”rn is right. The 26 letters of the ASCII character set are
 MvdV>> not enough to properly express oneself in writing. Even for the
 MvdV>> Brittish it is not enough . No pound sign 'œ' in ASCII...

 HD> You can write UKP for it, no special sign needed ;-).

The problem with thse acronyms is that they are seldom unique. I get hundreds
of hit when I google "UKP". For startes:

Univeriteits Kliniek voor Paarden.
Utrechtse Komeptite Programmeren.
Ukranian Kommunist Party
Unieke Kansen Programma
UKP Worldwide (a parcel service)
UKP Prins Joep I

And so on, and so on.  The UK Pound may have been way further down the list.

 MvdV>> The early computers were a step back.

 HD> Yes.

 MvdV>> My first typewriter had no problems with accents and tremas.

 HD> Mine the same.

 MvdV>> It even had a key for the Dutch concatenatd 'ij'.

 HD> I have never learned about that special character at schools.

See above. It was NOt a special charactyer when I learned it. It was the
'y'that was "foreign".

 MvdV>> But computers have evolved.

 HD> Yes, not every one will follow, we have here someone only writing in
 HD> lc. That's a choice others should also respect.

Respect should be a two way street...


 HD>> First I have the UniCorn BBS system at Dos 5 with CP437

 MvdV>> My memory may fail me, but IIRC even DOS 5 had the CHCP command
 MvdV>> to switch code pages.

 HD> I am aware of that.

 MvdV>> It came with at least a dozen. CP850 and CP866 included.

 HD> In the fido software you could choose for one at a time only.
 HD> Changing after every message was and still is almost undoable.
 HD> For the next message you had to leave all the programs, than change
 HD> codepage, en then start all programs up again,

Then maybe you should widen your horizon. Even for DOS reader that can change
encoding on the fly have been around for a quarter of a century. No excuse..

 MvdV>> For DOS there was also CYRILLIC.COM.

 HD> Even a far from my bed show I have not the energy for.

Just downloading the program and typing CYRILLIC at the DOS prompt did the
trick.

 MvdV>> Almost all websites are UTF-8 these days. So of course you will
 MvdV>> hve problems with saving it in Latin-1. Adapt or be left
 MvdV>> behind...

 HD> I had no choice,

There is always a choice. You have choosen to not upgrade your hardware to keep
op with 21st century state of the art and stay with your antiquated harware.
That is your choice. I respect that, but I won't go as far as completely
halting progress for all of Fidonet just because you choose to stagnate.


Cheers, Michiel

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