[aprssig] Future Concept for APRS (NOT Tracking only)

[Robert Bruninga]

Again,
I have no objections to any other text system,
*** as long as it does not break anything now.
*** and continunes to support ASCII as now used.

And by far (>85%) the biggest mobile text display terminals are
the D7, D700, D710, VX8R, Hamhud, Byonics, and Argent Data
systems.  If you can do the testing and show that UTF-8 does not
break theses systems(lock them up or otherwise) then lets get on
with it.

Bob, WB4APR


> -----Original Message-----
> From: aprssig-bounces at tapr.org
> [mailto:aprssig-bounces at tapr.org] On Behalf Of Heikki
Hannikainen
> Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 4:52 PM
> To: TAPR APRS Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [aprssig] Future Concept for APRS (NOT Tracking
only)
>
>
> I disagree about a lot of stuff, but in the interest of
> improving APRS
> messaging, I'm only going to concentrate on this point:
>
> On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Robert Bruninga wrote:
>
> >> Besides, the most popular and most affordable
> >> APRS devices can only do tracking. The messaging-
> >> capable rigs are still a bit expensive.
> >
> > But we are talking about the FUTURE of APRS, not the
simplistic
> > lowest common denominator.  And most of the problems we see
> > today are because of people taking simplistic short-cuts to
> > minimum functionality and not fully implementing the
protocol
> > properly.
>
> Now, on aprs.fi, about 40% of the visits last month were done
> by users who
> prefer to use it in English. The other 60% used another
> language (say,
> Finnish - http://fi.aprs.fi/, or French -
> http://fr.aprs.fi/). 100% of the
> visitors used UTF-8, since all aprs.fi pages are served to
> you in UTF-8.
> Let's talk about the future (UTF-8) and the lowest common
denominator
> (ASCII).
>
> If you're going to want that 60% to use messaging, messaging
needs to
> support the other languages well. The standard way to do this
> on the other
> networks today is UTF-8. It works, and it works pretty well.
>
> This message, which contains some japanese here (日本語) is
written and
> transmitted in UTF-8. All those of you who cannot read the
> Japanese part
> because you only have ASCII terminals can still read the
> English parts.
> This, sort of, proves that UTF-8 is backwards compatible with
ASCII.
>
> If messaging does not support my language, or the languages
> of 60% of the
> users of my software, I don't care about messaging. The
protocol
> specification has broken it for me with a draconian decision
> by someone
> behind the ocean. :)    Shall we change that?
>
>    - Hessu
>