Xref: utzoo soc.culture.nordic:1594 comp.std.internat:542
Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!draken!psv
From: psv@nada.kth.se (Peter Svanberg)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <2360@draken.nada.kth.se>
Date: 21 Nov 89 10:50:55 GMT
References: <472@enea.se> <1353@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Reply-To: psv@nada.kth.se (Peter Svanberg)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 44

In article <1353@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
heimir@rhi.hi.is (Heimir Thor Sverrisson) writes:
>
>People with seven bit terminals can put filters on their news readers
>so they get something meaningful out of the eight bit charaters. They
>could for example translate the upper case icelandic thorn into 'Th'
>and 'o accute' into 'o'. Then I would be able to use my middle name 
>SPELLED CORRECTLY in my signature. I could also send you direct mail 
>in Danish and you could answer me in Swedish. 
>

As usual, when you change fundamental things like this, you must make
it as invisible as possible for everybody who hasn't got the equipment
for or isn't interested in the improvements you can get as a
consequence of the change. So, those who want the improvements is the
ones who must make an effort to GET them, not everybody else to AVOID
them (at least not when "everybody else" is in great majority).

>We have been using the ISO set here in Iceland for some years now and 
>I'm very surprised of how far behind the Scandinavian contries are in 
>this sense, they all seem to be using (their own special version of) 
>seven bit modified ASCII sets.

There are a number of problems with converting to use an eight bit
character set. A large one is that most of the software and hardware
we use doesn't know anything about it. (Yes, this is slowly changing
now, but it isn't good yet, and certainly was not several years ago!)

What did you use before? Have you really converted to ISO 8859-1
everywhere in Iceland? On which operating systems?

Other differences between us and you is that you have more non-ASCII
characters than we have and that you - being a small isolated country
- are very caring of your language etc. (For us it's rather the
opposite on the latter point.)

But, as I said, things are changing. I predict some character set
confusion (of another kind than the current) in Europe in the next few
years, followed by - comparatively - calm, in perhaps five years.
---
psv@nada.kth.se			(should work!)	       Peter Svanberg
uunet!nada.kth.se!psv		(for lazy nodes...)    Dept of Num An & CS
psv%nada.kth.se@uunet.uu.net	(ARPA nodes)	       Royal Institute of Tech
						       Stockholm, SWEDEN