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Side comment: "The ASCII ribbon campaign was an Internet phenomenon started in 1998 advocating that email be sent only in plain text" When people say "plain te
by dmd 3y ago
Side comment: "The ASCII ribbon campaign was an Internet phenomenon started in 1998 advocating that email be sent only in plain text"
When people say "plain text", they really mean "American English". When you rephrase it like that, it sounds a bit racist ... because it is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hedora 3y agoClaiming the ASCII ribbon campaign was racist is neither technically correct nor practically correct. There weren't any machines that supported ASCII directly that late in the game. Instead, everything supported DOS code pages. Those are supersets of ASCII, and those supported localization. This was often called "ASCII", since that's pronounced with fewer syllables. On top of that, by 1998, mainstream systems were starting to support UTF-8, and, as a superset of ASCII, it was treated like "just another" plain-text format / extended ASCII code page by software user interfaces of the time. Practically speaking, the campaign was against sending HTML (or, god forbid, RTF) emails. That doesn't preclude localization at all.
- currymj 3y agothe "ASCII ribbon" referred to a ribbon drawn as ASCII art, not an insistence that people use exclusively ASCII characters. Unicode is still plain text and supports any language you can think of, and also most languages you can't think of.
- JohnFen 3y ago> When people say "plain text", they really mean "American English" No, when people say "plain text", they mean not HTML.