Re-(un)aliasing thread

Posted under General

Well, with the aliases it's irrelevant if they have special characters or not, so if it's site policy not to have special characters then I'm guessing they should be changed. I kind of like it like this though, it looks better.

Special characters are generally a pain in the ass when it comes to automatic parsing. ASCII is a pretty standard encoding worldwide, whereas UTF-8 is not. It usually makes sense to express data in ASCII unless you have a really good reason not to.

Hey now, I'm all for universal UTF-8 adoption, if that's what miffed you. But the fact is that it's not there yet. Even if it were, there's certainly no reason to prefer dna² over dna^2. There are all sorts of idiosyncratically presented titles, names, etc. etc., but what we generally do is uniformize them to ASCII, don't we? Actually, were it not abundantly clear that it's supposed to carry the meaning "squared", from a typographical perspective I'd advocate using dna2.

LaC said:
Neither. The fact that it's never been brought up before shows that there's no problem with ranma½ in practice.

Well, I do get encoding exception emails almost every day from people trying to copy and paste ranma½ in whatever non-UTF-8 encoding scheme they use. Although aliases wouldn't really alleviate that.

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