At 08:56 PM 07/11/2000 -0800, Geoffrey Waigh wrote:
>On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
>
> > At 15:30 -0800 on 07/11/00, Asmus Freytag wrote about Re: Euro
> > character in ISO:
> >
> > >There has been an attempt to create a series of 'touched up' 8859
> > >standards. The problem with these is that you get all the issues of
> > >character set confusion that abound today with e.g. Windows CP 1252
> > >mistaken for 8895-1 with a vengeance:
> >
> > The problem would go away if the ISO would get their heads out of
> > their a$$ and drop the C1 junk from the NEW 'TOUCHED UP" 8859s and
> > put the CP125x codes there.
>
>Except that would break all the systems that understand that C1 "junk,"
>and a number of systems do so because they are adhering to other
>ISO standards. If you are going to force someone to change their
>datastreams to something new, they might as well go to some flavour
>of Unicode anyways.
Who is going to get broken if I say on my MIME header (or HTML) that my
CHARSET is (example) ISO-8859-21? You are talking about uses where the
computer is talking to a device and needs the C1 range to tell it what to
do not another computer (where it is just passing a text stream). The C1
codes are DEVICE CONTROL and have no purpose (except to occupy slots that
are better used for extra GLYPHS) in EMAIL or HTML transfer. I am NOT
asking for anyone to change their mode of operation - only for ISO-8859-x
codes that are designed for transfer of printable data. UNICODE is not a
viable option since all we are talking about is the ability to select from
a number of 256 codepoint 8-bit tables not go over to UTF-8 or UTF-16
(which would require changes to the program code).
>Geoffrey
>"tilting at terminal emulators, err windmills."
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