Bert,

On Sun, 10 Mar 2002, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Hannes Hirzel wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Stéphane Rollandin wrote:
> > > [snip]
> > 
> > P.S. May I ask you not to use the accent aigu in your 'from field'.
> > Unfortunately your name shows up as something like
> >     
> >      iso-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane?= Rollandin.
> 
> Actually this is not Stéphane's problem, but your email client's. I can 
> see the name just fine. 

Yes I know it is a sensitive issue to ask a French speaking person not to
write accents.

However compare for example the archives
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/squeak/1063088

and the Squeak powered 
http://macos.tuwien.ac.at:9009/MailArchive.recentTopics

has the same error.

I consider the disadvantage of not having the accent aigu a minor one
compared to just having garbage instead of the name. And what about 
Germans having umlauts in her name? They often go for ae, oe, ue 
instead of ä, ö, ü. Email communication unfortunately still means
ASCII only. 

 
> You know, asking to not use accents is somewhat like demanding to write
> uu instead of w because it's double-u anyway. Accents *do* make a
> difference. Or do uue uuant our uuords to look like this? ;-)

Yes in many languages they definitly _do_ make a difference. But not
actually in French. You can read a French text without accents perfectly
well.

Of course on a French swiki I would write my contributions with accents.
I normally just type my French texts in MS Word without accents and then
have the spell checker insert the accents. This would be a nice thing to
have in a Squeak swiki as well ([hint,hint]).

Your example with the w is not on the same level. The digraph uu would be
considered a long u in many languages which is not the case in the example
you give.


Regards

Hannes Hirzel


P.S. A side notice: I was curious and did a search for Stéphane on 
www.google.com. It gave 430'000 hits. Some of them omitted the aigu 
in the title although it showed then up in the text. But the interesting
issue is that the homepage of Squeak list member Stéphane Ducasse showed
up on the 24th entry. 
http://iamwww.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
Extraordinary! Perhaps his Squeak activities have caused this.