The 8-bit equivalent looks correct on a West-Euro 8-bit terminal. It looks
hideous with no resemblance to Swedish reality on a US-ASCII, JIS, or any
other non-West-Euro terminal.
It will be ignored in the US because it is unneeded and
unimplementable on a great deal of installed equipment.
Mark, while I'm very sympathetic to parts of what you are saying, let's
not weaken the argument by overstating it.
- I have a DEC VT320 on the desk in my office. It supports 8859-1. In
hardware. It is definitely a US, and US-ASCII, terminal.
- I am sitting in front of an IBM PC clone, worth about $600 in street
price, including its VGA monitor. I am running kermit on it, with a
street price of $0. It supports ISO 8859-1 (and, incidentally, several
other 8859 character sets, including that of the Cyrillic persuasion.
There are a very large, and growing, number of these kinds of devices
around. They may never support Unicode or 10646, but they do support
8859-n for selected values of n, almost always including "1".
Now, if what you are saying is consistent with "there are a lot of
people here who have gotten this capability without (a) wanting it, (b)
realizing it, and (c) giving a d--m about whether or not they have it,
I'd have to agree with you. But the capability is very much here.
Speaking as an instance of an American, I would prefer to see Patrik's
or Keld's names spelled the way they spell them, without either having
to consult my little chart of 646 NLVs (most people in this country
don't know where to find such a chart) or, worse yet, trying to deduce
what a character shredder did to them. And, if a lot of people in this
country don't learn to be at least that tolerant and interested (it
isn't much), the trends in the economy have only one way to go.
john