But Keld, that is of no use to anyone except people with Macintoshes.
Well, Macintoshes are quite widespread, you know.
Now while I think it's grand that you've added a special case for us,
I'd much rather come up with a general solution - a common spec that
we can all communicate with, and that Mac's extended character set
converts into and out of. Otherwise, you force everyone to know our
character set, in order to display it.
Well, mnemomic is sort of a general solution, that everybody can
communicate in, as long as a subset of ASCII is present.
The Mac table is to be able to convert in and out to the mnemonic
code. And you can have a *mnemonic* Mac charset, displaying the extended
Mac characters as they are, and the others with the mnemonic code.
There is something like 90 character set tables in RFC-CHAR.
Other equipment (non-Mac equipment) can then display the mnemonic code
as well as they can, with e.g. common 8859-1/Mac codes displayed
correctly, and special Mac characters like the Apple logo displayed
with the mnemonic two-character code and an intro character.
To have everybody know the Mac character set is not a great nuisance
IMHO. We have in the UNIX world had a knowledge of terminal types
and their associated control functions for a long time, viz
termcap and terminfo, and that was a quite complete discription
of each terminal type for hundreds of terminals. I see the description
of character sets in RFC-CHAR to be in the same order of magnitude,
if not less complicated. It is quite manageable.
Keld