Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes:
I just came back from a meeting about RFC-XXXX, IN EUROPE, BY EUROPEANS.
(Well, Scandinavians; they are at least on one edge of Europe....)
That parenthetical remark is important! I believe that the use of
perversions of ASCII (:-) to accomodate national characters hasn't
spread in parts of Europe outside Scandinavia (if that includes
Iceland). I have never received e-mail from Germany, France, Italy,
Spain or Portugal with names containing {|} -- they all drop the
accents or use alternatives developed for telex (ue for u-umlaut
etc.). The same holds here in the Netherlands.
It's not that I believe non-ASCII headers are not important -- it's
just that repeatedly the opinions and problems of SCANDINAVIA are
brought up as opinions and problems of EUROPE as a whole...
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido(_at_)cwi(_dot_)nl>
"What a senseless waste of human life"