No Subject

[Robin McFarlane <robinmcf@altern.org>]

Matt Langford underlined:
>In the discussion a while back on cool Mac matching braces, for example, I
>didn't see the "cool" letters.  All I saw was gibberish.  "No accounting
>for taste," I thought.  :)  At least until someone converted the symbols
>to descriptive English prose.

I apologise if I'm wandering (again) from the main point of the discussions
here -I got the same gibberish Matt got despite being on a Mac. Although I
am a native English speaker most of my adult computing life I've used non
English operating systems. I currently use a Mac running Kanji talk
(Japanese MacOS) and previous to this I used a MacOS Italian version ( full
of accented vowels). They're out there and more people than you may think
use them - why not allow for them, that's what programming is about right -
forseeing and forstalling problems. Maybe I'm stating the obvious but PERL
gets used a lot on the Web and the Web is global and this equates to mind
sets (operating systems) for people as well as computers. But the attitude
of the Net in general seems to be "Global village - great, they just better
speak English tho..." I got the same gibberish Matt got despite being on a
Mac.

As a small aside I tried to FTP files containing Japanese HTML onto a
server using Anarchie. Normally good sturdy, robust, doesn't hang and gets
the job done, Anarchie doesn't make a faithful copy (not being savvy to non
English characters) and translates all the textual content into gibberish,
so I have to do the job by hand. Lack of foresight? bad programming?

     Information is liquid - it takes up the form of its container.



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