"Patrik F{ltstr|m" looks correct on a Swedish 7-bit terminal. It looks
hideous with no resemblance to the Swedish reality on a US-ASCII, JIS, or any
other non-Swedish terminal.
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.
There is no significant difference in the two.
The real big problem we have now, and sure asia will have in a couple
of years, is that the computers and terminals made in the US, now uses
the 8-bit version (8859-1) of our local characters and not the 646 7-bit
local character. So, with help from you over there, the sendmails
distributed with the UNIX operating systems now violates RFC-822!
It did not do that before if you just see the line with 7-bit
characters as a mess, you don't understand swedish anyway (you might
do that of course) so it doesn't matter if which swedish characters
we use in replacement for the US-ASCII in our 646, but now with
8859-1 we clearly violates the 822.
We can see that in sweden since a couple of years. Mails, netnews is
beginning to float around with 8-bit characters, and there is
a lot of trouble with this.
In other words, the only thing that is really accomplished by the 8-bit based
proposals is -- in theory -- to eliminate the problem for Western Europe.
Yes, the 8-bit based proposals, but we will not stop at the 8-bit based
proposal. We wanted that the text-header fields to be treated exactly
as the body of the mail. Maybe using a header-body as I saw as one
proposal a couple of minutes ago.
One way or another, 7-bit US-ASCII will
remain the ONLY interoperable platform for international communication, no
matter what fantasies you in Europe may have.
Come on now. You can not sit there on your chair and ignore the reality.
There really IS a problem with 8-bit characters nowadays because we
do have the 8859-1 on every system. The computer manufactures distributes
systems that violates RFC-822. When we have UNICODE or 10646 on our
computers they will sure use that character set in their mailing system.
You see, in a country with local characters the state will NOT by
any means buy a system that NOT uses the local characters in mail.
The bosses that buys the systems can not take the word from the manufacturer
that tries to say that "we only use US-ASCII because otherwise we do
break the RFC-822". That manufacturer is dead on the swedish market, and
have been since both Sun and DEC started to use ISO-8859-1.
The only thing I am really afraid about is what will happen when the
manufactures starts to use multi-octet characters... Then we have the
same problem again, but in Asia with billions of people. After recieving
a couple of mails in UNICODE I hope you understand that people really wants
to use their own characters and not a 646-rewriting of ASCII.
I still understand why, and how you thinks and where you find your arguments.
It would be nicer and easier to only use US-ASCII as you say, but that's
not reality. We do have 8859-1 and will have UNICODE and 10646 in a couple of
years.
Patrik