paulo's questions arise out of a more complex context, which has a big bunch of people scratching their heads. here's the "discussion" of it at distributed proofreaders:
i put "discussion" in quotes because -- as usual, eh? -- marcello simply ends up calling everyone else an idiot. even lucy24, one of the smartest workers over at d.p. in a nutshell, the "more complex context" here is that marcello has been making "executive decisions" lately. ostensibly aimed at changing the p.g. site for "mobil", these decisions are impacting p.g. policy in a big way. marcello isn't even trying to hide that fact these days. for instance, over in that forum thread at d.p., he says that "nobody understands encodings" which is why he "scrapped them for good"... evidently, everything gets served up from p.g. these days as utf8, because that is what marcello wants. so the ascii and latin1 files are described as utf8, which might be technically so, but is also misleading. perhaps the powers that be at p.g. approved the shift, but marcello sure doesn't make it sound like anything other than that _he_ "decided" it... marcello goes on:
As for why PG still requires ASCII and other extinct encodings, ask the WWers, not me. I've been fighting that requirement for years.
so i'd guess that once he consolidates all his power plays, marcello will get around to his next agenda and gut this "requirement" which he has been "fighting" all these years. after all, since you no longer call the ascii file an ascii file, nobody would miss it if it were to quietly just not be there. i just wonder if that'll happen _after_ michael hart is dead, or whether it will be the thing that puts him in his grave... either way, p.g. will never be the same... -bowerbird