Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!haven!decuac!e2big.mko.dec.com!bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: eunet.followup,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Code Page Conversion
Message-ID: <1991@enea.se>
Date: 12 Aug 90 16:49:52 GMT
References: <keld.650287734@dkuugin>
Followup-To: comp.std.internat
Organization: Enea Data AB, Sweden
Lines: 22

Keld J|rn Simonsen (keld@login.dkuug.dk) writes:
>No ISO 8859 is not outdated. ISO 8859-2 covers Eastern Europe,
>and ISO 859-5 covers Russia (Cyrillic). 8859 does not cover
>Japanese and other Eastern character sets, though. This was the reason
>we decided on ISO 10646.

What I meant when I said that 8859 was obsolete is that one year
ago it seemed like you could live with having to change to
another character set to read and write Polish, Hungarian etc,
since the political and econimical situation would make such
cases would be rare. Now when they suddenly are joining the
free world this cases could be expected to be more freequent.
And I am not only talking articles and mail in these languages,
but also multi-language texts. For instance if Lech Walesa ever
appears on Usenet, it would be nice if his name could come up
right with a slashed "l" and cedilla on the "e".

(But of course, with all ancient mailers, archaic Unix varieties,
GNU-Emacs, etc, I'm in doubts that anything than plain seven-bit 
ASCII will ever be regarded comme-il-faut on Usenet. :-)
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se