From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 08:40:37 CST
In <20021103151345.14831.qmail@kairos.algonet.se> sommar-usefor@algonet.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>There is an opposition where between #5 and the rest. And if the list -
>God forbid - would settle on #5, there are a number of choices:
>- Punycode.
>- u_+RFC2231.
>- charset not necessarily Unicode (Bruce Lilly's stance)
>- no support at all for non-ASCII chars in newsgroup names
No, if (God forbidding or not) #5 is chosen, then further technical
discussions would be needed to decide on the exact encoding. I don't think
we want to include specific encodings in the poll because that would
involve detailed discussions of the various options and if (as some
people, God included or not) hope #5 is not chosen, then that would be so
much discussion wasted.
>In the same way, #1-4 are alternatives that all have UTF-8. If a vote
>results in 8 for #1, 9 for #2, 9 for #3, 2 for #4 and 10 for #5, the
>non-UTF-8 alternative has the most votes, but is still in clear
>minority.
No, the form of the Poll will be to ask each voter to place them in order
of preference.
So people who place #5 at the top of the list still get to
indicate which of the others they would prefer should they be outvoted.
Likewise, if people choose #1-4 in some order with #5 at the bottom of the
list, they are saying that they would prefer _any_ of #1-4 over #5, and
the result will reflect that if that is the majority opinion.
And if someone has a particular dislike to one of the #1-4, then he might
even place #5 in the middle somewhere.
The method of counting such votes was devised by the Marquis de Condorcet
at the time of the French Revolution (he lost his head, naturally :-( ). I
can explain further if people are interested, but he was able to prove
that there was no other system that could accurately reflect the
preferences of people in this sort of multi-option situation.
>Of course I can envision that there are people who could support, say,
>#2, but never #1 in such case would go for a #5 solution. Then again,
>someone might be prepared to accept 2231, but totally oppose Unicode.
Yes, the Condorcet system can cater for all such tastes. Essentially, if
you place A higher than B, and a majority of people place A higher than
B, then B is definitely 'out'. (Whether A is 'in' depends on how it is ranked
relative to B, C, D, ...)
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5