Why do webforms often refuse non-ASCII characters?

[Phil Smith III]

That must be irritating. As a "Philip" I'm somewhat sensitive to getting my name right--it's not "Phillip" with two "L"s! The (surprising number of) people who see it as "Phil Smith" and reply "Dear Phill" are particularly irritating. And I bet Erik is tired of "Eric". It's just rude. Though if the headers say "Andre" and the body says "André" I'm sort of inclined to give someone a pass--once. After that, it's just laziness.

Curious, though, André--quoted printable works in email address display names; are you using an MUA that doesn't support that? Or is the list server doing this to you?

-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at corp.unicode.org> On Behalf Of Erik Carvalhal Miller via Unicode
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2025 11:26 AM
To: Andre Schappo <A.Schappo at lboro.ac.uk>
Cc: unicode at corp.unicode.org
Subject: Re: Why do webforms often refuse non-ASCII characters?

On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 6:20 AM Andre Schappo via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>
> From: Andre Schappo via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
> Reply-To: Andre Schappo <A.Schappo at lboro.ac.uk>

> In digital communication, the majority of people write my name as Andre instead of André. Why? They see me write my name as André. Does the diacritic not register with them.

The diacritic does not always register with your digital communication.  When I encountered these mentions of your name with the acute accent, I actually did a double take and scrolled back up to the message headers to verify the memory of what I had seen, for the lack of diacritic had registered with me…