Excerpts from mail: 17-Nov-94 Re: SWEDISH CHARACTERS IN E.. Masataka
Ohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)c (976)
True enough. There are also:
-- People whose mail readers DIE when they get this (really!)
-- People whose terminals simply turn this into A, and don't like this
fact (i.e. they'd rather know it was a special character!)
-- People whose programs display this as
'^HA
which really isn't better than =XY. (The tool I'm using at the moment
is in this category.)
Without a standard, you can't possibly make everyone happy. -- Nathaniel
Yes, and that's the problem of the unregulated combinations of
combining characters of ISO10646/UNICODE.
People who are satisfied with Latin-1 or other precombined
characters may not be able to notice the problem, though.
This is utterly ridiculous. My mail tool. understands Latin-1.
However, it still represents 'backspaceA as '^HA, because the underlying
tools are designed to permit the viewing of arbitarry (possibly binary)
files, not pseudo-composed characters.
In other words, my system can show me the Swedish characters perfectly,
but only if they are labelled as such. It does NOT just assume that
every use of backspace is part of some weird combined character, because
there's no way to do that and be consistent with other reasonable uses
of the system.