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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 sk
by 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 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