In a message dated 2001-05-03 11:09:38 Pacific Daylight Time,
jameskass@worldnet.att.net writes:
> Special characters on PCs have been entered in this fashion
> since before Windows, and this might have been one of the
> reasons that decimal numbers were originally chosen for
> HTML notation -- users already had the decimal numbers
> of their commonly used special characters memorized.
Memorizing the 128 8-bit characters above ASCII is decimal was (relatively)
not too difficult. Even today, when typing á é í ó ú, I am likely to use
Alt+160, Alt+130, Alt+161, Alt+162, and Alt+163 repectively (as I just did).
Doing this with the whole BMP is quite another matter.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:18:16 EDT