Re: corporate serial killers

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Harry Binswanger  on Thu, 22 Mar 2007
19:06:12 -0400

> Robert wrote: "extremely handy, for example when
> writing HTML" which puzzles me, because HTML is ASCII

HTML is whatever the Content-Type or META declaration "charset=" parameter says
it is.

The default HTML charset, if none is specified, is ISO_8859-1:1987 (also known
as ISO_8859-1, ISO-8859-1 [the preferred MIME alias], latin1, CP819, and other
names). However, many HTML user agents select their own default, and some even
ignore a charset declaration. Outside the context of HTML, ISO-8859-1 is
called CodePage 819. Rogue publisher Microsoft does not recognize or support
CP 819 outside of HTML. Microsoft's default charset for North American and
Western European versions of M$ software is windows-1252, within and without
HTML. Windows-1252 is similar to ISO-8859-1, but deviates from it in
significant and large areas.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the official U.S.
representative to the International Organization for Standardization (a.k.a.
the ISO). Microsoft appropriated and applied the imprimature "ANSI" to its
"windows" charsets, including (and especially) "windows-1252", based on an
early draft of standards circulated by ANSI. In the actual event, ANSI instead
standardized the ISO-8859 character sets, together with the rest of the
computing community. So the appellation "ANSI" applied to windows charsets is
fundamentally a falsehood; ANSI has never standardized the windows charsets.

When I use the term "ANSI" in U2's Help document, I always specify that I mean
CodePage 1252. Because Microsoft chronically ignores international standards,
we who operate in the M$ environment are obliged to accept many dubious
propositions. One of these is that, in common Windows-user parlance, "ANSI" =
CodePage 1252.

ANSIfied XyWrite adapts XyWrite IV to CodePage 1252. A few compromises are
necessary, mainly because XyWrite's non-TrueType (Speedo) fonts do not
completely reproduce CodePage 1252. In the main, though, ANSIfied XyWrite is a
true emulation of 1252, and hence far closer to NBWin than to Xy4.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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