🚀 go-pugleaf

In regard to Mr. Sherwood's complaint re IS 8859-1:

>This standard is based on nations rather than languages.  So the West European
>version doesn't handle Welsh or Catalan or Esperanto (which don't have their
>own nations).

    You perhaps have a copy of an old draft of the standard - the
    original bias towards nations was pointed out late in 1985 and acted
    upon.  You will find that the current standard lists laguages for
    which the character repertoire is applicable, instead of nations. 

    Regardless, any particular part of IS 8859 is only capable of
    supporting a subset of the languages supported by the Telematic
    service code, IS 6937-2. The latter standard is so capable mainly
    because it uses the technique of floating accents (non-spacing
    characters), causing characters with accent marks to be coded in two
    bytes.  The parts of IS 8859 were developed in response to the
    outcry for fixed length character codes. 
                                                     
    Catalan and Esperanto are handled through IS 8859-3.  Unfortunately,
    some of the characters for Welsh have not yet been accomodated
    through the IS 8859 codes -- work progresses, however, in the
    relevant standards committees to correct this oversight. 
    
    And as far as linguistic "equality" is concerned, IS 6937-2 doesn't
    do anything for languages based on Greek or Cyrillic scripts, not to
    mention Malayam, Indic, or Arabic, or any of the ideographic
    scripts.  Only a few codes developed in the bibliographic community
    can truly be said to give "equality". 
                                            
Tim Lasko,  Digital Equipment Corporation,  Maynard, MA  lasko@video.dec.com
(Member of ANSI and ISO character coding committees)     lasko%video.dec@decwrl
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DISCLAIMER: I speak from my experience with the standards process, not 
for the company I happen to work for.