5 ms·

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCI

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

greenyoda 5y ago
Or even languages that use the Latin alphabet, but with various accent marks, such as German, French, Spanish, etc.
- emteycz 5y ago
  These languages have developed ways to cope because of SMS.
  - afc 5y ago
    German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?" I agree with most of this article but, as a Spanish, German and Italian speaker, you can bet I'll refuse to write in an unnecessarily crippled and incorrect version of these languages; I'm very grateful for Unicode.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I think these languages shouldn't be crippled too. However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.
      - kkfx 5y ago
        Why not in Greek? Why not in Serbian (with Cyrillic alphabet)? Why not in Hangul (South Korea)? Why not in Japanese (in all their three alphabets)? If you want an easy international language, that's why we (humans) invented many years ago the concept of international auxiliary languages, Esperanto as the oldest/most known but various others exists. That's the SOLE way to have their own mother language and a secondary language for "any nation" that does not give advantages to any nation (so far English is the global language just because they were the winner of the last big world war, before was French etc) and so can be accepted by anyone. Remember the principle of communicating vessels, no matter the present global situation, if it's not egalitarian than sooner or later will be weaponized and things change. If really neutral and useful it might survive. The Swiss choose Latin as a symbolical neutral language, we might do something better for something less symbolic but much more important in practice...
    - MarcusE1W 5y ago
      The work arounds in German exist, but they are rarely used and look extremely inelegant. Even before smartphones with virtual keyboards became common many people preferred to press a few extra keys in their SMS to get the correct Umlaut than to write ue, ae, oe, ..
hnlmorg 5y ago
The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.
- zero_shift 5y ago
  I disagree. Even in 2015, pretending ASCII was a workable universal format involved either pretending non-occidental languages didn't exist, or, as I darkly suspect is the case with many US-based computer scientists, forgetting their existence entirely.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    “Universal” has two meaning here: 1. Works with everyone’s language. Which ASCII does not 2. Works on pretty much every machine. Which ASCII does very well. I’m not defending the use of pure ASCII but if you’re concern is that the text is rendered universally then ASCII wasn’t the worst suggestion a few years back. What you’re arguing is a different requirement and that’s support for peoples languages. If that’s a concern then ASCII isn’t the right choice. Those two requirements are not mutually inclusive.
- RobertMiller 5y ago
  > The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places If the article had been written 20 years before it actually was, maybe. You're making me feel old here, 2015 really was not very long ago and little of relevance to this discussion has changed between then and now.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    I know 2015 wasn’t that long ago (I’m pretty old too :) ) but it wasn’t that long ago when language support for Unicode was patchy (Go is only 12 years old and it was a big thing that supporting Unicode out of the box). Even as late as 2015 some popular desktop applications either didn’t support Unicode or didn’t default to it. MySQL only supported utf8mb4 in 2010 and it took a few years for that version to become wide spread. Plenty of servers I managed back then didn’t even have Unicode locales installed. To be clear, even in 2015 _I_ personally would have recommended Unicode (like yourself) because it was clear that it was, and is, the future. But I can forgive some people for being cautious about it even as late as 2015 if universal comparability was their concern. My point is, if you’re only targeting English speakers _and_ you’re primary concern is portability then ASCII isn’t wasn’t unreasonable recommendation.
mmwelt 5y ago
Quite so. Much of what the article says is interesting, but nowadays, I'd say using UTF-8 would be more reasonable.
badsectoracula 5y ago
Assuming you know the language (otherwise you wouldn't be able to read the article :-P) you can still write in English. I speak Greek but all my notes, text, etc are in English, which also helps if i want to share them at some point with others.
gnubison 5y ago
The way I interpreted it was, “if ASCII will suffice, then use that.” In other words, use --- instead of —, " instead of “/”, and so forth. If you’re writing in a different language then obviously (at least to me) this advice doesn’t apply.

greenyoda 5y ago

Or even languages that use the Latin alphabet, but with various accent marks, such as German, French, Spanish, etc.

emteycz 5y ago
These languages have developed ways to cope because of SMS.
- afc 5y ago
  German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?" I agree with most of this article but, as a Spanish, German and Italian speaker, you can bet I'll refuse to write in an unnecessarily crippled and incorrect version of these languages; I'm very grateful for Unicode.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I think these languages shouldn't be crippled too. However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.
    - kkfx 5y ago
      Why not in Greek? Why not in Serbian (with Cyrillic alphabet)? Why not in Hangul (South Korea)? Why not in Japanese (in all their three alphabets)? If you want an easy international language, that's why we (humans) invented many years ago the concept of international auxiliary languages, Esperanto as the oldest/most known but various others exists. That's the SOLE way to have their own mother language and a secondary language for "any nation" that does not give advantages to any nation (so far English is the global language just because they were the winner of the last big world war, before was French etc) and so can be accepted by anyone. Remember the principle of communicating vessels, no matter the present global situation, if it's not egalitarian than sooner or later will be weaponized and things change. If really neutral and useful it might survive. The Swiss choose Latin as a symbolical neutral language, we might do something better for something less symbolic but much more important in practice...
  - MarcusE1W 5y ago
    The work arounds in German exist, but they are rarely used and look extremely inelegant. Even before smartphones with virtual keyboards became common many people preferred to press a few extra keys in their SMS to get the correct Umlaut than to write ue, ae, oe, ..

hnlmorg 5y ago

The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.

zero_shift 5y ago
I disagree. Even in 2015, pretending ASCII was a workable universal format involved either pretending non-occidental languages didn't exist, or, as I darkly suspect is the case with many US-based computer scientists, forgetting their existence entirely.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  “Universal” has two meaning here: 1. Works with everyone’s language. Which ASCII does not 2. Works on pretty much every machine. Which ASCII does very well. I’m not defending the use of pure ASCII but if you’re concern is that the text is rendered universally then ASCII wasn’t the worst suggestion a few years back. What you’re arguing is a different requirement and that’s support for peoples languages. If that’s a concern then ASCII isn’t the right choice. Those two requirements are not mutually inclusive.
RobertMiller 5y ago
> The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places If the article had been written 20 years before it actually was, maybe. You're making me feel old here, 2015 really was not very long ago and little of relevance to this discussion has changed between then and now.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  I know 2015 wasn’t that long ago (I’m pretty old too :) ) but it wasn’t that long ago when language support for Unicode was patchy (Go is only 12 years old and it was a big thing that supporting Unicode out of the box). Even as late as 2015 some popular desktop applications either didn’t support Unicode or didn’t default to it. MySQL only supported utf8mb4 in 2010 and it took a few years for that version to become wide spread. Plenty of servers I managed back then didn’t even have Unicode locales installed. To be clear, even in 2015 _I_ personally would have recommended Unicode (like yourself) because it was clear that it was, and is, the future. But I can forgive some people for being cautious about it even as late as 2015 if universal comparability was their concern. My point is, if you’re only targeting English speakers _and_ you’re primary concern is portability then ASCII isn’t wasn’t unreasonable recommendation.

mmwelt 5y ago

Quite so. Much of what the article says is interesting, but nowadays, I'd say using UTF-8 would be more reasonable.

badsectoracula 5y ago

Assuming you know the language (otherwise you wouldn't be able to read the article :-P) you can still write in English. I speak Greek but all my notes, text, etc are in English, which also helps if i want to share them at some point with others.

gnubison 5y ago

The way I interpreted it was, “if ASCII will suffice, then use that.” In other words, use --- instead of —, " instead of “/”, and so forth. If you’re writing in a different language then obviously (at least to me) this advice doesn’t apply.