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 FAQ / 658
    Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?] —Todd Lehman
   (...) Hee hee! COOL! Say, I wonder if math-geeks have a strong natural affinity toward custom tools like that? Why design a special tool and a custom markup when HTML already exists? Answer: Because it's easy, more pleasant to work with for lots of (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq)
   
        URL characters —Todd Lehman
     (...) Gulp, I made the same mistake in my URL detection code on the web interface here. Just tightened up the set of allowable characters a bit and regression tested...much better now. BTW, I'm consciously going against what W3 says about the ~ (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq, lugnet.admin.general)
    
         Re: URL characters —Lee Jorgensen
       (...) Unix makes the ~ character a users home directory ... so UnixSystem/~lee ... would be my home directory ... Now because of this, and since the Internet (Arpanet) were all college schools when it 'went public', the system of choice at colleges (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Todd Lehman
      (...) That's what I thought the etymology of ~ was in URLs too -- but how did it ever get *allowed* in URLs in the first place? That's what baffles me. The first time someone tried it, why didn't it fail? The early browsers and httpd daemons must've (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Kevin Loch
       Wouldn't NCSA be the one to blame? ncsa-httpd supported the feature that caused people to use ~. Did they make that up? KL (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Larry Pieniazek
       Universal Resource Locators (that's what it stands for) started out as path descriptions. For why twiddle is supported, you might read up on the Andrew File System. ~lpien is a valid file path (that is, you can cd to it) on a CTP unix box, or was (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Todd Lehman
      (...) Total grokkage there! (Been using ~ for that since '84 :) It's one of the Truly Great Simplicities of modern day computing life, IMHO. (...) I think -that's- the key thing! (People considering it broken.) URLs & URIs do disallow twiddle (ASCII (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
    
         Re: URL characters —Jacob Sparre Andersen
     Todd Lehman: (...) The primary reason for disallowing ~ is the special treatment it gets in several European languages. If people type <slash> <tilde> <s> <p> (expecting "/~sp") some systems will just return "sp". Similarly if people type <slash> (...) (25 years ago, 26-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
    
         Re: URL characters —Todd Lehman
      (...) Wow. OK, that certainly makes sense. So, the hypothesis is that "~" may have been disallowed so that commonly available software (which used "~" for special formatting tricks) for certain languages didn't have to be altered to parse-recognize (...) (25 years ago, 26-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Jacob Sparre Andersen
       Todd Lehman: (...) It works like I described (at least the ~n case) even in Word97/Win95(DK), so I am not sure it is correct to call it a "backward" compatibility problem[1]. People have to learn to type <tilde> <space> to get a tilde on most (...) (25 years ago, 27-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Anders Isaksson
      Jacob Sparre Andersen skrev i meddelandet ... (...) for (...) It has nothing to do with different software (MS or others), it's in the keyboard driver (OK, that's probably MS). On a Swedish keyboard '~' is a 'dead char', which is automatically (...) (25 years ago, 31-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Todd Lehman
      (...) Me too -- I know what you mean. And the cluelessness about non-U.S. conventions is IMHO even worse than the chauvinism... One thing to remember, though: The A in ASCII does stand for American. :-) Say, I've got a user-interface question about (...) (25 years ago, 2-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Selçuk Göre
        (...) Tilde is not a shift+anykey character but rather RightAlt+anykey (ü in Turkish "q" keyboards) character. RightAlt key (actually named as "Alt Gr") behaves differently from LeftAlt key in most european keyboards and only used for performing a (...) (25 years ago, 2-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Anders Isaksson
      Todd Lehman skrev i meddelandet ... (...) Agreed, but in my vocabulary 'clueless' rings harsher than 'chauvinist', am I totally out of line there? (...) I don't have all the messages in the thread left (and am off-line, as usual), but I'm sure my (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Selçuk Göre
        (...) We have two different keyboard configurations here, "q" and "f". In the first one, letters are all located as a "qwerty" layout with a few additions like ç ö ü and some others that you can't see if I type, and almost all the special (...) (25 years ago, 2-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Todd Lehman
       (...) Oh, not at all -- that's exactly what I meant. U.S. cluelessness about non-U.S. conventions is even worse than U.S. chauvinism. At least chauvinists know that other conventions exist. :-) (...) Yes, but the reason ISO-8859-1 (for example) has (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
      
           Re: URL characters (off-topic) —Anders Isaksson
        Todd Lehman skrev i meddelandet ... (...) Pointers...??? Who needs pointers? We're talking about Pascal, right? :-) With the Object Pascal implemented in Borland Delphi, you can get a looong way without ever using pointers (consciously). BTW, I'm (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
      
           Re: URL characters —Bram Lambrecht
        (...) What about just using a Dvorak keyboard? I've never seem one, but it is designed to lessen finger movements across the keyboard, where as QWERTY was designed to slow people down so their typewriters wouldn't jam... --Bram Bram Lambrecht / o o (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
       
            QWERTY keyboards (was: Re: URL characters) —Fredrik Glöckner
        (...) I don't think the original purpose of QWERTY was to _slow_ people down. Many mechanical typewriters can operate at hair raising speeds. What causes the typewriter "hammers" to jam is usually two subsequent letters from the same area of (...) (25 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
       
            Re: QWERTY keyboards (was: Re: URL characters) —Todd Lehman
         (...) Hmm, I thought the original purpose of the QWERTY keyboard was to make sure that, while giving a demo, the word TYPEWRITER could be plucked out using all keys from the top row of letters. ;-) --Todd (25 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
        
             Re: QWERTY keyboards (was: Re: URL characters) —James Powell
          (...) Yes, but in the process of making it slow down, you also make it into as inefficent as possable. (and have the keys as far from one another as is possible) My mom has a 70 year old _mechanical_ typewriter, and on a good day, I can still jam it (...) (25 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
        
             Re: QWERTY keyboards (was: Re: URL characters) —Shiri Dori
         (...) That's cool! I never noticed that ;-) -Shiri (25 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
       
            Re: QWERTY keyboards (was: Re: URL characters) —Todd Lehman
        (...) Just for fun, here are a couple one-liners which spit out a list of words that can type typed on a single hand using a QWERTY keyboard... Left hand: cat /usr/dict/words | grep -i '^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]*$' Right hand: cat /usr/dict/words | grep -i (...) (25 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
      
           Re: URL characters —Jacob Sparre Andersen
       Todd: [...] (...) Assuming we still are talking URL's, it is discouraged/invalid because there is a significant risk that people get it wrong if they type it in (which they shouldn't do). You are right that it shouldn't be necessary to rule it out (...) (25 years ago, 5-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Shiri Dori
      (...) That sounds really useful! Although, as Todd mentions, would take a while to get used to... (...) Or try a hebrew keyboard. The english characters are on the same places. But when you switch the drive to hebrew, you get totally different (...) (25 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
     
          Re: URL characters —Dan Boger
      On Mon, 6 Mar 2000 05:10:07 GMT "Shiri Dori" <shirid@hotmail.com> wrote concerning 'Re: URL characters': (...) I belive the basic hebrew keyboard configuration comes from hebrew typewriters - which had the comma and semicolon on the upper left side (...) (25 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
    
         Re: URL characters —Shiri Dori
     (...) I'm guessing these are supposed to be letters + tildes on top. Funny thing, tho' - on my computer, which has a Hebrew + English system, I see them as hebrew letters. I've rarely seen that before - I think the only other time was when someone (...) (25 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
    
         Re: URL characters —Selçuk Göre
      (...) No it's not your system..:-) it's just the case of different code pages. Same extended ASCII codes used for specialized characters of many other languages at the same time. I mean what you see on the monitor when you type a special character, (...) (25 years ago, 5-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
   
        The way of the Math Geek (was Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?] —Robert Munafo
     (...) I actually believe my main reason for doing it was that I had to create hundreds of pages of HTML, and I didn't trust any of the "HTML authoring tools" to do what I wanted. Basically, I thought other people's tools would have bugs or (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
   
        Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?] —Robert Munafo
   (...) I should also point out that I have an almost pathological affinity for using ASCII when about 99.5 % of the sane world would use graphics. For example, see: (URL) actually wrote general-purpose code for converting bitmap images of line art (...) (25 years ago, 21-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq)
   
        Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?] —Jeremy H. Sproat
   (...) Ho...ly...smokes. This is cool. Cheers, - jsproat (25 years ago, 21-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq)
 

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