Beware the ç

Oh my! I ruined Peter Rukavina's blogroll (update: he's found a fix since). It's probably the saddest side-effect I've had on the blogosphere so far (but I'm confident I can outperform myself again in the future). Peter, I'm sorry. But you should blame the US ASCII monoculture for that. Don't you think that, in 2003, it's an absolute shame that a character as common as ç can still cause such trouble for most information technologies out there? I share your pain, I can't tell you how many times a day I struggle with registration systems, cookies, etc. that cannot properly swallow my first name. François is my second name :(.

We'll talk about that again around 2010. After a decade spent at exporting all IT jobs to Mumbaï, we'll see if that helps us sort this problem out.

5 Comments

I completely agree with you!

I know of another one who allways write "Fran=E7ois". And in one of my previous company, I was used to read "Francios".

We could build an association of the Regularly (Randomly) Mispelled Names.

Ah, I forgot about Fran=E7ois! This one is my third name, in emails.

Thank you, I just wanted to give a greeting and tell you I like your website very much.

Hi François again,
like I said in the "Happy New Year 2004" thread, I even don't have the "ç" on my keyboard and we are "close together" if it comes to geographical "close", just a "jump for a cat" from the middle of Germany to Paris :o)

But maybe you know, we have the same problem in Germany with our "special characters" (ä,ü,ö,ß), maybe even more problems, 'cause they're not even special signs in most international fonts (like "ç" is in many fonts fortunately). So my hope is with you, that sometimes this will all come together a bit more, but if I will be living these days I'm not sure my friend...

Anyway, we are strong enough to "stay over this" and communicate although there are language problems (my bad english is a problem too, but I hope everyone can read & understand it mostly) and I like to contact that many people from all over the world, so as you do François.

Greetings from Germany, Dave.

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