Re: 8859-1, 8859-15, 1252 and Euro

From: Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 11:15:43 EST


Alain LaBonté wrote:
>
> Erik van der Poel a écrit:
> >
> > If you don't use browsers in mainframe environments, then why are we
> > even talking about that here?
>
> Because texts can be copied and pasted in email messages from HTML files
> and then inevitably they can go to a mainframe environment (or UNIX) and
> back... Data loss guaranteed if the C1 space is used for graphic
> characters. In French this is dramatic (for the EURO sign as well, and for
> Finnish too).

There is a boundary between mainframes and the Internet. There is a
gateway at that boundary. The gateway should take care of the octets in
the C1 range, so that the big mainframe doesn't choke on the data
produced by the little PC. The gateway will need to do this for UTF-8
*anyway*, so it might as well do it for windows-1252 too.

On Unix, these C1 octets can be mapped to appropriate glyph codes, if
the user has installed some of the more modern X fonts, such as
*-iso10646-1. The Unix apps are still somewhat behind perhaps, but they
will eventually catch up or die. We are planning to make some changes to
Unix Mozilla 5.0 to deal with these windows-1252 characters (and UTF-8
too of course).

Erik



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