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RE: objection to proposed change to "consensus"

2006-01-06 15:12:45
This

On the other hand, it does appear that the availability of ASCII
support as a common denominator is decreasing over time.  As has been
observed, some software vendors seem to go out of their way to make
simple ASCII hard to use.  So there is increasing pressure to find
a (truly) better solution.

This is the nut of the output representation problem for me.

Most people who object to changing the output format talk about ASCII as if
it always was the standard, and always will be the standard.  If we were
having this discussion 30 or 35 years ago, we would be discussing whether
ASCII would take over EBCDIC or not.  35 years ago, it would not be clear
that ASCII would survive.  There was a holy war about that.  ASCII did in
fact take over from EBCDIC, but it wasn't always clear that it would.

As Bob points out, we are, in fact, coming to the end of the line for ASCII.
It's not in trouble this year, except that it's pretty damn tough to print
it satisfactorily on the machines most of us have to work with.  I suspect
it will get increasingly difficult to create and edit in the not too distant
future.  That would make it a possible minimum common denominator archive
format, but not a useful reading format.

It's probably true that we can push this problem off another year, but maybe
not, and definitely not for very much longer.

Brian  



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