[conspire] I renounce the devil Unicode and all of its works

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> IMVAO, the situation of incorrect rendering of your personal choice of
> page encoding on other people's browsers is just stupid. 

That might be a very cogent viewpoint if I had ever done that.

I did not express any view about what other people choose to do with
their Web browsers, let alone impose 'incorrect rendering' on them.  I
merely mentioned the character set in which I prefer to write in the
English language.  

Ed Cherlin apparently thinks it's his business to publicly dislike my
preference in character set for writing the English language on the
Internet, so he posted a spokescreen of insultingly obvious bullshit
objections including that bushwah about writing English requiring 500
distinct characters without math symbols, as if we were all utterly
incapable of distinguishing between writing English on the Internet and
prepress DTP markup.  He then followed that up with a non-sequitur
complaint about HTML markup of a page on my Web site (whose URL he could
not bother to cite), under the implicit (and erroneous) assumption of it
being mine -- a point we'll return to in a moment.

> Why the #%&$#$ don't the content-type settings in the HTTP header
> _and_ the HTML webpages themselves, which presumably (I have not
> actually looked) both specify ISO 8859 specifically, tell all the
> browsers to do it the way you want?

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what page you're asking about.  Perhaps
you wouldn't mind being a few orders of magnitude more specific?

If you're talking about the Web page Ed Cherlin found and attempted to
make some sort of tiresome issue out of, that Sylvia Rippel created from a
tongue-in-cheeck faux letter to the editor in _Blue Notes_ magazine,
that (in turn) I wrote during my editorship, I'll reiterate that I
merely found and mirrored her page.  It's too bad that the HTML encoding
is whacked, but not my doing.  I'll possibly get around to fixing that
some time -- on at least the same level of urgency as all other
suggestions by net.randoms that I do volunteer work fixing other
people's errors with no particular advantage to myself.

If you're talking about Eric S. Raymond's page that he generates from
DocBook SGML based on the essay he and I co-wrote, then again you will
want to take up that matter with the person in charge, and not me.

If you're referring to something else, then consider posting some
comprhensible mention of what the frell you're talking about.