Re: If you were John Connor wouldn't you be inspecting Cameron for "damage" on a daily basis?

Dano <janeanddano@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>"Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
>news:k4OdnSnEK_bESE3anZ2dnUVZ_rGhnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> Every body ELSE on Usenet hates OE because its default setting break
>> every long-standing Usenet convention. Long-time OE users who care
>> eventually learn what settings to use to avoid sending alternate parts
>> and HTML, for instance. As you've discovered, it doesn't quote with
>> quote characters on every message. That's broken behavior, but
undoubtably
>> Microsoft is doing something nasty to screw with a competitor.
>>
>> It's using the proprietary Windows-1252 character set, which is almost
>> like Latin-1 ISO-8859-1 but not exactly, since it reverses a few
>> character positions and adds in characters appropriate to typesetting
>> (like open and close quote) that are inappropropriate in what's
supposed
>> to be a plain-text environment like Usenet.
>>
>> You'll just have to go through every setting in Tools > Options and
>> change them, but I can't advise you on that. There must be a place to
>> tell it to use ASCII (or Latin-1, if you really, really have to use
>> certain characters from western European languages).
>
>I have no doubt you are correct ( though I confess to not understanding
much 
>of your digression) :)...

ASCII: Plain old 7-bit character set, a subset of ISO-8859-x character
sets and Unicode character sets. This goes back to teletypewriter days.
Control characters were used to control the carriage and line and page
positions of the paper roll in the remote typewriter. These control
characters remain in the character set but all but four are depricated.

The "accent" key on your keyboard with ~ (tilde) and ` (grave accent) on
it
is a legacy of the teletype era. Accented characters in Western European
languages were formed with the base alphabetic character, a backspace
motion of the carriage, then the accent was overtyped. ' and ", which one
normally thinks of as single and double quote, were also used as acute and
double acute accents in overtyping. Looking it up, the double acute accent
is used in Hungarian, which I didn't know. There's also a double grave!
It's used in Serbo-Croation and Slovenian! I assume an overstrike single
grave was used for this purpose.

Why does the ASCII character set include the obscure backslash and
vertical bar key \ | ? I have no clue why it was thought these printing
characters were necessary in teletypewriting.

The Baudot code used in Telex messages was merely 5 bits, so it was much
more limited; no lower case letters!

ISO-8859-x and Windows-125x character sets are 8-bit sets. The 8-bit
characters vary from set to set and Windows-125x assigns certain 7-bit
characters that would otherwise be ASCII control characters to printable
characters.

The problem with ISO-8859-x versus Windows-125x sets is that they are
very similar, but the exceptions drive everyone nuts. Even on a Windows
machines. many displays expect ISO-8859-1 by default and not Windows-1252.
It's said that Microsoft swapped the positions of several punctuation
characters to screw up the spreadsheet manager Lotus 1-2-3 when they were
trying to force everyone to use Microsoft Excel spreadsheet manager.

If a newsreader marks a character set, it should use the lowest common
denominator character set for maximum compatibility. So if your message
has no 8-bit characters at all (none of your messages appear to include
any 8-bit characters) it shouldn't be marked with an 8-bit character
set. Either don't mark it or mark it as ASCII. But Outlook Express isn't
known as a well-behaved newsreader.

>Since this is the first complaint I can recall getting...I'm not going to
be 
>up nights fretting.

As far as the issue of not supply quote characters when quoting specific
messages, I think that's a bug, possibly address in a program update.
But I really don't know what's going on. It showed up a year ago.

>I did just poke around in all the settings I could find, to no avail. 

At least you looked.