[H-GEN] UTF-8 vs ISO-8859-1

[Bruce Campbell]

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Greg Black wrote:

> On 2006-06-23, Troy Piggins wrote:
>> I was looking at http://archive.humbug.org.au/humbug-general
> That's why I was carefully giving you the URLs to use.  And also
> trying to convince other people to use them too.
>> Interestingly, your mails[1] are already in the archive but none of the
>> others.
>>
>> [1]
>> http://archive.humbug.org.au/humbug-general/2006-06/msg00023.html
>> http://archive.humbug.org.au/humbug-general/2006-06/msg00024.html
>
> The archive at archive.humbug.org.au has been prone to a variety
> of problems in recent times.  I've noticed that there are often
> periods when you can't get anything out of it at all.

I've noticed that as well.  Someone should really contact the operator of 
that service like good netizens that we all are and point out any 
deficiencies in the service in a polite and helpful fashion.  If someone 
did do that before flinging what amounts to FUD around in a public forum, 
then someone would have no cause to be frowned upon by the said operator 
as they point out what a rude thing someone did.

Until someone does do that, someone probably will never formally find out 
about a machine failure in Brisbane and some interesting network filters 
being applied to the Amsterdam node's network by said node's hosting 
provider, causing the customised (and normally relatively fast) syncing 
between nodes to stop for slightly over a week, or whatever else the 
operator's karma seems to encounter on a monthly basis.

> However,
> the automatic archives at lists.humbug.org.au/archives have been
> reliable and useful for ages and I would recommend that approach
> to the list archives for all the lists and for everybody.

My personal philosophy on mail list archives is that you should be able to 
follow threads, irrespective of when they were created.  For example, when 
reading http://lists.humbug.org.au/archives/general/2006-May/025896.html , 
where is the link to the previous mail in the same thread?

When reading the same mail via 
http://archive.humbug.org.au/humbug-general/2006-05/msg00001.html , the 
interface does provide a link to the previous mail in the thread, and the 
other referenced mails.  By that standard, lists. is not useful to me.

In answer to the original question, the only reasons that you, in 
Australia, would need to go outside US-ASCII is to get foreign currency 
symbols (the Euro is in ISO-8859-15, not ISO-8859-1 btw), or you are 
trying to type the proper names of some of the players Australia has come 
up against recently.

--==--
Bruce.