Re: ASCII convention

Jonathan Buss wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote: 

Peter Daniels is not interested in coding. Peter Daniels is talking
about the fonts on desktop computers -- the fonts that ordinary
scholars, not up-to-the-minute tech gurus like yourself, use in
preparing their scholarly manuscripts. If any portion of the "coding"
process is visible to the end user, then the coding process is a
failure. Just as no one using a typewriter needed to know anything about
its innards other than changing the ribbon (though presumably they had
their secretary do that).


Cars are carefully made to all work basically the same way. This "same way" does differ crom country to country -- e.g., right-hand vs left-hand driving -- but in any one place, they all do basically the same thing (with some differences in controls such as wipers, etc.).

Typewriters or computer keyboards are much the same as cars. Choose either QWERTY or Dvorak (or ...) as your locale warrants, and forget it.

Much computer software is deliberately made not to work like other software. Microsoft has made most of its billions because they do not follow standards. They successfully forced other companies to chase their changes. And they have obstructed the growth of standards. 

Perhaps a less cynical view is that computer programs are never
"stand-lone" or "self-sufficient" contraptions like automobiles.  They
need a plethora of other programs and devices in order to provide
the most basic function, and there are numerous protocols and
conventions governing the interoperability.  A newsreader program
must be compatible with the operating system, with font files and
font handling procedures, with other editor programs and/or
cut-and-paste protocols, with the data format used by the newsserver,
with that of other newsreaders, etc.  In this light, it is best to
think of a program as a component rather than an entire system.
The standardization of these protocols and conventions are driven
by market forces, not techical merits.  This is not particular to
software.  For example, I would be very surprised if the head lights
for my Toyota Camry would fit my Mazda van.

What is particular to software and computers, however, is that the
pace of change is far greater than things like cars.  Things get
dated, if not outright obsolete, rather quickly.  Backward
compatibility is not always possible or honored.  It is willful
ignorance not to realize that a program X "works" only as long
as other programs decide to support the protocols and conventions
X uses.

Character encoding is an important aspect and there must be an
agreement between the sending newsreader program and the receiving
one in order for information to be conveyed.  Equally important is
the convention for labelling which encoding scheme is used.  In
Peter's case, the Netscape/MacOS combo uses an encoding scheme
that was never real standard and do not even label the encoding
scheme correctly.  Moreover it does not understand one of the
most popular encoding schemes (utf-8).  However, if Peter thinks it
is still good enough for him, it is his pejorative.

To answer Peter's question, I think anyone using a computer to
prepare manuscript files that are to be read by other computers
should at a minimum realize that what they store in the files
are not "characters" but "codes", and that there is a plethora
of conventions and protocols involved (explicit or otherwise)
in mapping the codes to the visible glyphs on the screen or a
printed page.  And that "MS Word format" or "Framemaker format"
are not fine enough specifications to ensure compatibility.

Tak
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Tak To                                            takto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
--------------------------------------------------------------------^^
 [taode takto ~{LU5B~}]      NB: trim the xx to get my real email addr

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