[inforoots] Re: that +AFs-inforoots+AF0- stuff

[Michael Albaugh]

Just FY-all-I, the first version came out "mostly correct" when viewed
via gmail.
It did have the funny +A...- stuff, which I believe (and this is why
I'm posting)
is an artifact of MSFT choosing "reserved, non-printing" characters for their
"smart quotes".

When ASCII was expanded and ISO'd for national character sets,
some of those reserved characters were used as sort of "escapes"
to introduce non-USASCII characters. (sort of the same goal as UTF-8,
but different in detail).

Anyway, when mail passes through various gateways, each tries to
"do the right thing" with non-ISO characters and various alternate
encodings, and, well, this is what you get.

Appropriate for Inforoots because this is a taste of what we, and our
successors,
will face with archived material. Not all (that is, very little) of it is marked
unambiguously for character set (Hand's up everyone whose web pages
_all_ have the proper character set attribute in the content-type. Didn't
think so :-), software that tries to "do the right thing" can make a bigger
mess, etc. The last computer I own that can properly read old Word
and PageMaker 3.0 files is on its last legs, and it was brand-spanking new
10 years ago. Something to mull.

Now, in my spare time I will be attempting to recover CDC3400 "Display-code"
(_not_ the same as IBM BCD, no matter what "the web" seems to believe)
text from a COSY archive, stored in a SIMH-style virtual tape, that I found
inside a .zip in one of my .tgz files in a Macintosh disk-image on my current
main computer. Not that I suggest anybody hold their breath :-)

  Mike