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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Edward Cherlin (echerlin at gmail.com):

> Yes, Rick, I'm top posting. I think myself justified in doing so,

No, not really.

> Apparently I was not talking about anything that Rick Moen ever did,
> so it is not clear to me why he is bothering me about it.

Why is this suddenly about _you_?   I simply said I liked using ISO
8859-15 for writings online in the English language.

You're not even _in_ California, any more.  Thus, the 'I'm behaving like
an only child who never grew up because I live in the state that's
unilaterally extended self-obsessed childhood past all previous
chronological limits' clause no longer applies to you.

Moreover, why the frell are you doing advocacy for Unicode, and utterly
ignoring the context where I said I simply regarded UTF-8, let alone
Unicode, as excessive and unneeded for writing English and many other
Western European languages for everyday purposes?  Would you be able to
spell 'total non-sequitur waste of time' if I furnished a character set
in which to write that?

> There is nobody forcing Rick to use Unicode. I was talking about its
> use to nutjobs like me who write documents in mixed Chinese
> (Traditional _and_ Simplified), Japanese, Korean, English, and various
> European languages, such as a glossary for the game of go;

So, basically, you are talking about something else entirely, and seeing
fit to do some sort of witnessing.  This is more than a bit non-sequitur
to the antecedent thread, don't you think?  As it happens, this appears
to be a common thing in gratuitous advocacy of grandiose
overengineering including but not limited to character sets.

I really don't like witnessings.

> (see also my sig); for One Laptop Per Child, which creates Free
> Software in 100 languages in 30 character sets;

Which has, of course, absolutely nothing to do with online writing of
English and other Western European languages.

> and for those who do engage in prepress, especially in math, APL, and
> multiple languages.

Talk to someone _way_ WAY more credulous, please.  In credible prepress,
you end up using application-specific markup.  And you have also changed
the subject, to the original of which we now return.

> Nobody who is happy with a legacy character set should bother about
> Unicode or Unicoders. 

Fine.  Go away, and take your UTF-8 with you.  ;->

> Did you never look at it in a browser?

I have a better question:  What the hell suggested to you that it was
either relevant or remotely useful or polite to nag me about someone
else's markup in a document that I chose to mirror for its humourous
content?  Are you _trying_ to get classified as a gratuitously annoying 
non-sequitur-indulging asshat?  

I cannot help noticing that you are not only continuing to ignore my
having mentioned that I didn't create the page in the first place, and
merely made a copy of it because it was amusing, but also are continuing
to offer no help whatsoever, _and_ are continuing to not even bother to
furnish the URL of the third-party HTML of which you are pointlessly and 
annoyingly complaining.  

I dunno:  Is this an attempt to _parody_ the typical annoying Internet
dweeb, and the imitation is merely so incredibly precise that the humour
is lost on me?

> I don't see how that can possibly render as apparently intended in any
> software.

I don't see how you can possibly think that my fixing someone else's
HTML just because you sent a stunningly perfect crapola bug report is
going to rise within the near future to a higher level of priority than,
say, sorting my lint collection.

> > But I'll eventually get around to fixing the excruciatingly bad markup
> > in that, now that you've pointed that out.
> 
> Thanks. 

It won't be for you.  Please see previous posting about likelihood of
thanks for variously useless degrees of commentary.

> There are similar problems on other pages. 

Which you could not bother to identify, making your report, as my old
boss's expression put it, 'almost useful'.

> I leave it up to Rick to decide how much effort this problem merits.

Yeah, gee, thanks.

[My correction of your erroneous assumption about my remarks concerning
Unicode:]

> > I don't loathe it as a general proposition, only as a ridiculously
> > excessive solution for the problem of western European (and especially
> > English) charsets.
> 
> That is not its purpose. 

Then, you have, as a further waste of everyone's tme, ignored the
context of my remark, which was entirely clear the first time, and
wasted my time and yours.  I resent the former; the latter's your
headache.

And no, it's not amusing when you _provide_ maximally effect methods for
writing 'cooperation'.  Diagramming someone else's joke does not
constitute humour.  (If the point is unclear, you may want to consult a
profesional comedian.)