From: "Alain LaBonté - ordi1dgsig" <alb@sct.gouv.qc.ca>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 17:20:26 -0700 (PDT)
[About 8859-15:]
Don't worry, transition will be as harmless as possible. It will be
a goodie for Europeans, a goodie for French-speakers (who will use
it outside of Europe immediately), and a goodie for Finnish
speakers, and will go almost unnoticed by others, who will anyway
continue to have the choice.
Alain, does that mean that you will immediately change from posting in
CP 1252 with a MIME charset of ISO-8859-1, to posting in ISO 8859-15
with a MIME charset of ISO-8859-1?
Partly I am just being snide here. I haven't heard of any cases where
the 1252/8859-1 distinction makes any difference for display: If a
system has any CP1252-compatible fonts at all, it probably uses them
for documents marked as 8859-1 as well. But documents in 8859-1 and
8859-15 need different fonts, and confusion here is worse.
[From an older mail:]
Finally it is true that in an ideal world we should avoid for
banking operations to use anything but 3-letter codes for currency
identification (I do not count, though, the number of Europeans
that invent new 3-letter symbols everyday without taking any look
on international standards, like GBP instead of UKP, SFR instead of
CHF, and so on -- that has to be said too -- it makes believe that
these are the true banking codes, while it has nothing to do with
them!)
I fully agree on the sillyness of inventing currency TLAs when anyone
can pop down to Forex and get a list of exchange rates with more
banking codes than they are ever likely to need. (And when a complete
list can be found at http://www.triacom.com/archive/iso4217.en.html .)
However, whether the UK'nians like it or not, the official code for
their currency _is_ GBP, and UKP is spurious. Just like the ISO 3166
codes for that nation are GB and GBR, regardless of popular sentiment.
Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@diku.dk> (Humour NOT marked)
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