Martin Frost me at invalid stanford daht edu wrote:
> It definitely annoys me when I receive mail from aol accounts. I have
> a macro in xemacs (my mail reader) that tries (!) to change suspicious
> question marks to spaces so that I can read it more easily. I note
> that some question marks appear in the middle?of a sentence, and I
> know not why, since that doesn't involve two periods at the *end* of a
> sentence.
I would think a similar mechanism. I've seen it in Usenet as well,
when I send out UTF-8 containing non-ASCII characters. When quoted by
some people, it comes back to me with question marks, because their
newsreader sends back they same bytes that came in, but puts an
ISOLatin1 header on it. Other people have a reader that ignores
my UTF-8 header and tries to render as something else. Sometimes
those people quote what they say is gibberish, and I see exactly
what I typed!
A question mark in the middle of an AOL sentence is probably
an em-dash or an ellipsis or a character with a diacritic.
--
Wes Groleau
"There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over."
-- Larry Wall
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