[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [Summary] UTF-8 Question: e with acute accent should requ
So the American Standard Code for Information Interchange begins life as a excellent way to encode characters used in the USA into 7 bits. It also allows for some control characters that have no equivalent in human communication (eg ACK/NAK) because it is a generalised information exchange encoding. It was restricted to 7 bits to allow for a parity bit so that unreliable modem communications could be easily checked (for 1 error bit). It was this accidental, but fortuitous, decision that in days of reliable comms (at least at the byte level) has allowed ASCII to be the basis of extended character sets. ie the MSB can never by 1 in ASCII so if it is 1 we can use that to change our interpretation of what follows. Most character encodings used for more complex character sets have ASCII as their starting point. They are ASCII extended for ... by ... This includes the UTF codings. The ubiquity of American English in the computer world means this will not change in the forseeable future. So the encoding for A is the same in ASCII and UTF-8 (by definition as an extension), but it is up to the application to recognise the encoding and then to display the character. Not forgetting that fonts can mean that A doesn't look like A (it could be represented as EAN128 barcode). Interpretation and agreement on interpretation is everything. There's a real sense in which UTF-* etc are the Rosetta stone of today. Rick Michael Kay wrote: >> We were speaking specifically of "ASCII" and "UTF-8", no? >> > > No, in the message in question we were talking about ASCII characters and > Unicode characters: that is, we were talking about character sets, not > encodings. > > Michael Kay > http://www.saxonica.com/ > > > _______________________________________________________________________ > > XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS > to support XML implementation and development. To minimize > spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. > > [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ > Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... > subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... > List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php > >
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] |
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|