ernst jünger in cyberspace

mailing list archive - What happens to the umlauts in your List mail?

I have just visited the »home base« of the List
[http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/juenger-list/]. I had not received any
postings for some time, and before believing in the demise of the List I did
the right thing, surfed to the right place. Clicking around there I found
out that the Mail Demon had decided I should not get any postings for some
time and had cut me off. It was easy to arrange for my mail to be delivered
again. I found the page very well organized, appreciated particularly the
new easy access to the List archive. John, you did an excellent job!

Looking into some archived postings I found to my dismay that texts passages
in German are terribly hard to read because all the umlauts and the ß are
transcribed into an annoying symbol gibberish. The hegemony of the English
language on the Internet seems still so overwhelming that there hasn't so
far been a general revision of the software being used for transmitting
mails. I know the French are working hard on it because texts in their
language with the many accents are even more brutally mutilated than German
texts. In German we could easily get around the problem by replacing the
problem signs with ae, oe, ue, ss.

If anybody on the List wants this way out to be taken let him step forward
and tell us!

Günter R.



Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.