[10465] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: ASCII and economics.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Howard Pasternack)
Tue Jul 30 20:17:42 1996
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 14:57:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: Howard Pasternack <BLIPS15@BROWNVM.brown.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Posted on 29 Jul 1996 at 19:29:37 by Michael Silverberg
>
...
>The point I thought was obvious - ASCII was originally a medium developed
>for Green (or Amber) on black but few people still use monochrome monitors.
>Must we still adhere to a format whose origins are far predate the majority
>of the hardware in use? But that is the overall philosophy that Prof. Hart
>seems to espouse.
>
ASCII pre-dates the development of cathode ray tube monitors, be they
green, amber, or any other color. According to the Dictionary of Computing
(Oxford University Press, 1990) ASCII is "A standard character encoding
scheme introduced in 1963 and used widely on many machines."
>
>I would mildly disagree. While elaborate formatting does need something
>like pdf or sgml, I do think that some basic style characteristics added to
>the character set would go a long way to make documents more readable and
>at the same time preserve cross platform utility. And I stand by, with
>emphasis, what I said about the need to standardize an extended character
>set so that accents, em and en dashes, typograhical quotes etc can be
>included. That is a basic requirement for being able to express what is
>currently basic English. Even Prof. Hart used -- after I said it makes me
>cringe. How insensitive of him!
>
For better or worse, Unicode is the standard for extended character sets.
What I find odd about this discussion is that particularly with the
World Wide Web, information transmission and dissemination has become
globalized. What may suffice in American English for an "extended"
character set will not work with many other Roman alphabet languages,
let alone the various non-Roman scripts.
Extended ASCII in the form of the USMARC characters (a.k.a. ALA diacritics)
has been around for some 30 years. While it doesn't provide for em and en
dashes, it does code most of the diacritics. And as a standard it has
largely been ignored everywhere except in library catalog systems.
Even today, it is difficult to impossible for many library systems to
display the characters to the end user. And cutting and pasting a library
screen into a word processor will generally lose whatever accented characters
there were to begin with.
Whether Unicode makes it as a generally accepted standard or as a replacement
for USMARC remains to be seen. But it is the standard for character
encoding.
Howard Pasternack
Brown University
