> [Alain] :
> 8859-1 will stay as is. No plan to change it, despite the fact that I heard
> a very big company say that we should have done it for the EURO while this
> company campaigned for years against any change of Latin 1 before, even to
> correct mistakes. (;
>
> The new part is being balloted under the name ISO/IEC 8859-15 (nicknamed
> Latin 0)
Ok.
> [Einar] :
> >No, we should keep ascii as it is.
>
> [Alain] :
> I fully agree. We should stop to use 7-bit per octet anyway.
I sometime wonder, whether I should create a "standard" (dateing it on the
1st of april), where I describe the new character set/encoding. It would
be a 5bit character encoding, with multi-byte commands, shift in/shift out.
The "base" character set would be the upper case letters: A, B, C, D, E, F,
G, H, I, J, K.
Other characters would be accesible by using "shift in" sequences, which
would change the available characters a bit.
If this new and enhanced "standard" would be accepted, then the
"hey-lets-mask-the-7bit" crowd would have some difficulties using it.
(Serves them right, for making us 8th bit crowd having difficulties.)
For example, RFC822, (a bit dated), states explicitly that the 8th bit
*must* be zeroed, even if the transport mechanism below can transfer 8 bit
octets undamaged. Why is that?
> If it catches on over time, on pure ISO-code machines, then I don't see the
> problem. If it does not, because pure ISO machines were hypothetically rare
> (I don't say that!), I see no problem either. But Latin 0 is required as
> there are missing links. And it is fully compatible with Latin-1,
> alphabet-wise, including Icelandic characters, so you will be personally
> reassured, Einar (;
Good! :-)
Also, consider how "lucky" we are, (put in quotes, because I'm not so sure
we actually are "lucky"...), having as the "first" latin character set the
"Latin-1". That means we can add a new set with even lower number (and
therefore ought to take precedence over "latin-1").
And if we want to get even more gross, we can start using negative numbers
for the "next" latin set.
For example, Latin--1, or should we have Latin+1 (as -- could be viewed as
+)
But enough of this ramble of mine... :-)
-- einari@complex.is
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:37 EDT