3 ms·

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger. Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name" after fi

by remram 5y ago

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger. Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name" after filling in a form.

throw0101a 5y ago
Plenty of cultures are myopic: I know some folks who lived in Korea for a while who would complain about web sites that only allowed four characters. Most family names are 1-2 Hangul characters: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames And most given names are 1-2 Hangul characters: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names Why would ever need more? /s My pet peeve is sites not accepting e-mail addresses with sub-addressing, i.e., the "tag" in foo+tag@example.com.
every 5y ago
US-ASCII predates the internet, UNIX, WWW and almost anything else you currently use. While seminal, it was certainly not prescient. Now it is little more than a fun artifact to play around with: https://every.sdf.org/ https://every.sdf.org/
- remram 5y ago
  US-ASCII predates those things in the US. In most other places, different alphabets predated ASCII, and indeed the US. Sort-of-old is no argument for quality or fitness for every purpose.
  - every 5y ago
    This is not about alphabets or character sets. It is about the first standardized computer-to-computer textual protocol. And that is US-ASCII. That it is all skewed to US characters is a derivative of where it was initially developed. But not to worry, zillions of other code pages for every language on the planet soon appeared, and yours probably included...
    - remram 5y ago
      I don't disagree that it was the first computer text protocol, I disagree that "128 character US-ASCII is fundamental" nowadays, or (from article) "ASCII text remains the universal interface", or "Use only plain ASCII text. (...) The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine." This is incredibly Anglo-centric and just plain wrong. It works fine as long as your colleagues are all named James, John, or Mike, but breaks down immediately once you meet a Françoise, Rémi, Cláudio, etc. Even the IETF's RFCs, arguably the most popular plain-text documents on the internet, explicitly allows non-ASCII characters. Because the internet is global and unicode exists. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7997.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7997.txt

by remram 5y ago

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger. Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name" after filling in a form.

throw0101a 5y ago

Plenty of cultures are myopic: I know some folks who lived in Korea for a while who would complain about web sites that only allowed four characters. Most family names are 1-2 Hangul characters: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames And most given names are 1-2 Hangul characters: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names Why would ever need more? /s My pet peeve is sites not accepting e-mail addresses with sub-addressing, i.e., the "tag" in foo+tag@example.com.

every 5y ago

US-ASCII predates the internet, UNIX, WWW and almost anything else you currently use. While seminal, it was certainly not prescient. Now it is little more than a fun artifact to play around with: https://every.sdf.org/ https://every.sdf.org/

remram 5y ago
US-ASCII predates those things in the US. In most other places, different alphabets predated ASCII, and indeed the US. Sort-of-old is no argument for quality or fitness for every purpose.
- every 5y ago
  This is not about alphabets or character sets. It is about the first standardized computer-to-computer textual protocol. And that is US-ASCII. That it is all skewed to US characters is a derivative of where it was initially developed. But not to worry, zillions of other code pages for every language on the planet soon appeared, and yours probably included...
  - remram 5y ago
    I don't disagree that it was the first computer text protocol, I disagree that "128 character US-ASCII is fundamental" nowadays, or (from article) "ASCII text remains the universal interface", or "Use only plain ASCII text. (...) The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine." This is incredibly Anglo-centric and just plain wrong. It works fine as long as your colleagues are all named James, John, or Mike, but breaks down immediately once you meet a Françoise, Rémi, Cláudio, etc. Even the IETF's RFCs, arguably the most popular plain-text documents on the internet, explicitly allows non-ASCII characters. Because the internet is global and unicode exists. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7997.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7997.txt