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

From: Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 11:32:16 EST


Frank da Cruz wrote:
>
> It's hard to believe that in the year 2000 we are still talking as though
> we don't understand why the C1 area should not be used for graphic
> characters in data communications protocols.

Oh, I understood that a long time ago. But times have changed. People no
longer adhere to the old C1 rules.

> PC and Windows code pages
> are fine for use inside the PC for which they are designed, but not for
> data interchange.

I think windows-1252 has a better chance of short-term success in the
important protocols (i.e. Internet, not mainframe) than UTF-8.

> This fly in the face of every international standard,
> including Unicode and ISO 10646, which have taken great care to leave the
> C1 area alone, and for good reasons such as the ones Alain has mentioned.

Um, both Unicode and ISO 10646 use octets in the C1 range, in UCS-2,
UCS-4, UTF-8 and UTF-16.

> That MIME allows one to put any old character set in the content of a
> message or web page is a travesty, and not an excuse to do it.

I doubt that you or anybody can stop the Internet as it is moving along
now. Instead of wasting your energy trying to stop this, you might as
well build better software for the "boundaries". Actually, I thought
that Kermit was already pretty good at dealing with various character
encodings...

Erik



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