Re: ANSI (was: corporate serial killers)

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

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