Re: ANSI (was: corporate serial killers)

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Patricia,
So ANSI is just an expanded character set? Meaning no disrespect to
character sets. As to the websites referenced under HELP ANSI, I see
references only to the character tables, which still leaves me puzzled by
Robert's HTML comment. Maybe he means that you can see things like &uparr;
(I think that's up-arrow) onscreen. Or is it that the web-world is ANSI, so
it helps with formatting? Or generally?
I find that everything computerish is a little mystifying until you get it
really explained concretely, at which point it's trivially obvious!

Regards,
Harry
> Harry Binswanger wrote:
> > Can someone explain, starting from scratch, what ANSI is about and why it
> > has any value? I understand that it's a protocol for encoding characters,
> > in competition to ASCII, but what's the deal with it?
> It covers far more characters (indeed, whole sets of characters) than
> ASCII. ASCII has always seemed to me to be one of those typical American
> monoglot kludges: "Accents? Those funny little doodads foreigners stick on
> some letters? Well, I suppose we need a few of them. Gotta do business
> with foreigners sometimes." I believe the full-fledged ANSI protocol has
> methods for encoding not merely the characters of the Greek, Arabic, and
> Cyrillic alphabets, but even the ideograms of East Asian writing. It (or,
> more properly, the international body responsible for the standard) was,
> IIRC, somewhat slower to realize the need for essential punctuation marks
> ("smart" quotes, em and en dashes and the like), but I believe the latest
> standards include them, at least as options. See the sites Robert cites
> (ouch!) in the Help to ANSI (which itself is a mini-course in the subject).
> Patricia M. Godfrey
> PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx