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Re: lynx-dev Foreign characters


From: Klaus Weide
Subject: Re: lynx-dev Foreign characters
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 19:43:37 -0600 (CST)

On Sun, 7 Nov 1999, Adalbert Goertz wrote:

> re 
>    Western (ISO-8859-1) 
>    7 bit approximations (US-ASCII) 
>    Macintosh (8 bit) 
>    RFC 1345 Mnemonic 
> >> 
> Adalbert Goertz responds >>>>>>>>>>>> 
> >> 
> 7 bits approximations 
> RFC 1345 Mnemonic  
> looks just fine. The other two not. 

If you computer cannot display those foreign characters "as themselves",
then you have to use one of the "replacements" character sets, as you
have found out.  Normally, most people would use

   7 bit approximations (US-ASCII)

The other one mentioned, RFC 1345 Mnemonic, is mostly useful for
debugging.  It has its own convention for showing those non-ASCII
characters, taken from the RFC 1345 technical document.  The advantage
is "no loss of info" (at least for all recognized characters) - this
seems to be somewhat in line with your original ideas how foreign[*]
characters should be handled.

The RFC 1345 Mnemonic display characters is also very useful for reading
texts *about* characters...  As an example take 
  <ftp://dkuug.dk/cultreg/registrations/narrative/da_DK,_4.3.html>,
a nice description of "everything you ever wanted to know about Denmark"
(wrt computing).  Where it talks about characters, reading it with
"7 bit approximations (US-ASCII)" doesn't make much sense.  With the
RFC 1345 Mnemonics it makes sense once you get a bit used to the &..
convention (not to be confused with HTML entities).  Having a copy of
RFC 1345 for reference helps, of course (for sources, see for example
<http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html>).

If you are unhappy with those two (and the third one, "RFC 1345 w/o
Intro", which is basically "RFC 1345 Mnemonic" with the "&" omitted),
you would have to come up with your own alternative replacements
table and convince your Lynx provider to compile it in.  (Or connect
in some other way, so that there is another componet involved that
can translate characters - I understand kermit can do that.)

[*] Of course they are only "foreign" for some people.

   Klaus


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