Re: Stripped Legacy

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, olivier Thereaux wrote:

> 
> On Jul 8, 2004, at 9:23 AM, brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca wrote:
> > I've seen about five ways to write an e-mail
> > [snip]
> > 	BTW, unicode is nothing but a headache to fontographers
> 
> This is all well...
> But what exactly does your opinion on these topic have anything to do 
> with the Markup Validator and other tools discussed on this 
> mailing-list? I am sure you *did* check the scope of the mailing-list 
> before posting to it, didn't you?

	utf-8 is short for unicode. Last time I checked, your server was
sending me iso-8859-1 and calling it UTF-8. As much as I would like to, I
don't happen to be in a position to upgrade my browser on the remote, so
what I'm getting from your server about unicode is a royal pain in the ass
(ARPITA).

	To repeat myself with more details, I get the same problem from
MicroSoft. So what? I don't subscribe to MSN, and I probably won't,
because last time I checked, doing anything serious with M$ software was
ARPITA.

	I get iso-8859-1 claiming to be utf-8 from the babelfish
translator on the web. That's more troublesome, because it means that I
would need to install something on my local host (which is not the remote
host your are getting this message from) for that kind of service.
Mechanical translators are crude, and they probably always will be, but if
I can make them jenerate intelligible English, then I'm probably on the
right track.

	I haven't used babelfish.altavista since they started insisting on
naming iso-8859-1 as UTF-8, because it was difficult enough to make that
server loop back to itself for seeing how English came back to me through
mechanical translation to another language before I started trying to work
in that language, directly, to (try to) round out the translation.

	The validator, on the other hand, is one that I hav recommended
implicitly with links for a long time, so when it started following suit,
instead of leading, it made A.R.P.I.T.A. for me in maintenance.

	Either I encourage W3.ORG to use standards that don't change every
three years and that require people to support *FONTS* (plural!) that they
will never understand, or I drop my links in favour of WebLint, which
means that I can't validate HTML 4.01, which I use, because it's more
convenient for printing fractals than any wordprocessor I happen to know.

	Just to twist my loyalties, that's one of few things that
MicroSoft happens to be good at: Making a browser that does a good job of
printing abutted JPEGS and PNGs, perhaps even if the end format is
Portable Document Format, through GhostScript. 
_______
Sloppy browsers ignore this tag:
<LINK rev=made HREF="mailto:brewhaha@ecn.ab.ca">
Sloppy people reinvent it.