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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
by 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 agoUS-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 agoThis 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 agoI 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