The 8:th bit liberation movement!

Help stamp out all 7-bit limited software in our lifetime!

Tired of all these lousy programs forcing you to use only 7 bit US-ASCII?
Hating the sight of all these å in HTML documents, %7E in HTTP URLs, or quoted printables (=7E) in your email or (horror) News articles and other abominations? Or how about digraphs and trigraphs in C?? *Puke*

Can you imagine how it would look like if, for example, the common "u", "s", "a" characters had ASCII codes above 128 and were stripped (and turned into "e", "d", "v" like the very common Swedish characters "å", "ä" and "ö" often are?)

Then come and join the 8:th bit liberation movement! If you are still not convinced then check out what the guru Linus Torvalds has to say on this issue.

How to do it?

It's very simple. Refuse to bend to the will of people and programs limited to 7bit-ness. Always make sure that you use fully working stuff. And flame the authors of 7bit-crippled programs!

Always use 8-bit characters in your News postings and email. Never use Quoted Printables (but do tag the messages with the correct headers:
```
	Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
	Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
```
Always use 8-bit characters in your HTML documents. Never, ever use the å abomination.
Never use the stupid %7E notation for "~" in URLs.
Never ever use digraphs or trigraphs in your C programs. If possible, disable your compilers detection of such ugliness. People using compilers that accept digraphs (and this miscompiles your programs) deserve what's coming to them.

What's the problem, and how to cure it?

A lot of innocent looking programs are not what you think they are... As an example, take a look at GNU ls, version 3.12. A nice program, but what do you find if you take a look into the dark corners of its source code? The 7-bit evil... You find statements like

if (c > 040 && c < 0177)

This made ls not willing to display beautiful filenames with 8-bit characters like å, ç and ¿ in them.

However, in this case, the evil features are easy to destroy, because the program is otherwise well written, and source code is freely available. One more program is cured, making the world a better place for 8-bit addicts like us.

Fixed programs

Join the effort to fix all damaged programs, and take a look to see what has been fixed so far:

References:

å and %7E (or in Swedish)

Note: The bug in ls described above will hopefully not be present in versions later than 3.12.