> 2) 7 and 8 bits
>
> First, one has to agree on:
>
> - The euro is not necessary in 7 and/or 8 bits.
> - The euro is necessary in 7 and/or 8 bits.
>
> If one agrees that the euro is necessary in
> 7 and/or 8 bits, one needs to *define* (thanks
> Larry) a new character set.
>
> If one goes for the range 128-255, this will not
> cover that 7 bits and again no euro or another
> position is needed in the range 0-127. Hence,
> to cover boths just go for the range 0-127.
>
> So two new character sets are proposed:
>
> - 7 bits : euro-ASCII (or ESCII)
> The same as ASCII but with the replacement
> of "|" (007C) for the euro.
>
> - 8 bits : euro-Latin1
> The same as Latin1 (ISO 8859-1), but with the
> replacement of "|" (007C) for the euro.
As a non-European, you can take this with a grain of salt. However:
is any self-respecting European IT application really using seven
bits? I think that e-acute and u-umlaut are more important to
Europeans than the Euro symbol. More importantly, I think you're
unaware of the importance of the pipe character to existing IT
applications. You find the strange mnemonic that ECU-ECU means
"logical or", while a single ECU means "bitwise or". And you will
hear European UNIX users say, "ECU the grep results through sed."
Redefine the generic currency symbol instead. As far as I can tell,
its primary use is the end-of-table-cell marker in MS Word; is anyone
actually using it for currency? I *think* it was intended as a
placeholder for local currencies anyway.
And as the world moves towards full Unicode support, local 8-bit
character sets will become less necessary except as encodings of
Unicode. If the ECU is properly defined in Unicode, it's probably not
even necessary to define a new 8-bit character set.
> 3) HTML
>
> A new entity
> €
Nice, but unnecessary, since one can use ₠ in HTML now, and will
be able to use ₠ in XML and define named entities on a per-
document basis.
-Chris
-- <!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN"> <!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN" "<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487 <USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek>
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