Re: Latin 1 is NOT superset of ASCII

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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 94 13:37:27 EDT
Message-id: <9406161736.AA02332@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: Latin 1 is NOT superset of ASCII 
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In message <9406161238.aa11418@dali.scocan.sco.COM>, Murray Maloney writes:
>
>To allay my concerns and to be very precise about what character
>sets and encodings are valid within HTML and WWW, I suggest that
>we refer only to ISO standards such as ISO 646, ISO 8859/1, and 
>ISO 6937/2.

I agree... I gather you're responding to my use of "ASCII" in my
description. It was meant only as a hint to my readers here.

We can't count on names like "ISO 646" meaning anythin to the
readers of the HTML specification. On the other hand, we can't use
the term "ASCII" because it has no widely agreed-upon meaning.

There is a term used in the IETF community for the 7-bit character
set used in internet mail and such: it's US-ASCII.

I agree that HTML should be specified in terms of ISO character sets,
but we should include some informative language that explains what
those beasts are relative to US-ASCII.

We will be safest if we do not rely on external definitions of ISO 646
and such, but rather call out each character code and give its
meaning, both in the SGML declaration and in the prose of the spec.

I meant to describe current practice in terms of character codes with
my little table. I'll leave it to Mr. Maloney to come up with the
specification wording.

Dan