Victor
On Thu, 5 Sep 1996, James Ruckle wrote:
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> ----------
> From: MishaGMCLA@aol.com[SMTP:MishaGMCLA@aol.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 02, 1996 1:11 PM
> To: jruckle@citynet.net
> Cc: manuelf@scf-fs.usc.edu
> Subject: Re: Diacritics on the Net
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> Hi, a friend referred your question to me, knowing I would tell you more =
than you ever wanted to know about the question...
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> >This is a technical issue, but one for the entire list to address. Is th=
ere a way to send diacritical (Spanish) characters over >the Internet? I a=
m using Microsoft Rich Text format, but that doesn't help if you all can't =
read it. It would be nice to have a >fairly universal way of sending accent=
ed characters, and the ASCII character set does include them, that's how I =
get them >on my Web pages.
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> No, unfortunately, the original ASCII character set does *not* include ac=
cented characters. ASCII values go from 0 to 127 ("7-bit ASCII"), while th=
e values from 128 to 255 ("high-bit characters", where the eighth bit of th=
e byte is set to 1 instead of 0), which include accents, bullets, mathemati=
cal symbols, yen signs and a lot of other useful stuff, were never standard=
ized. =20
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> I don't know about UNIX or other systems, but there are two de facto micr=
ocomputer standards, DOS/Windows and Macintosh. You may have noticed that =
the DOS character set (I don't know whether it was originated by IBM or
> Microsoft) has lower-case acute accents but not upper-case, except for E =
(that's probably because French uses it, but they were apparently less conc=
erned with Spanish at the time). You will also notice, if you're still usi=
ng Alt-plus-numeric-keypad, that there's no rhyme or reason to the numbers.=
More recent software has provided more convenient ways of getting the acc=
ents where they belong.
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> The Macintosh developers used the high-bit characters differently - since=
fonts and graphics were part of the Mac operating system from the beginnin=
g, the Symbol font with a full range of mathematical characters was availab=
le,
> and box-drawing characters were unnecessary, so the Mac character set inc=
ludes things like curly quotes, dashes, etc. The Mac also has a much broad=
er range of accented characters, including upper-case. =20
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> Unfortunately, however, not one has the same value as the corresponding c=
haracter in the DOS set, so if PC users and Mac users "tildan sus letras" a=
nd email them to each other, the result is not pretty. =20
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> The text attached to your message, accented correctly on the Mac, appears=
as follows (I don't know how it's going to look when it gets to you, but i=
t'll be as strange as the PC-accented text was to me):
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> Esta es cuestion tecnica, pero una para todos los listeros. ?Hay manera d=
e mandar letras diacriticas por el Internet/InterRed? Estoy usando el Forma=
to Textual Rico de Microsoft, pero eso no vale si no pueden leerlo. Seria b=
ueno
> si hubiera metodo mas o menos universal de mandar letras acentadas, y el =
ASCII las incluye, pues por eso las tienen mis paginas de Tela.
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> What's more, different mailers and transmission systems process the high-=
bit characters differently, which is why you get subject lines like "FIESTA=
DEL =3D?iso-8859-1?Q?A=3DD1O" and email messages with things like "much=3D=
EDsimo" in them.=20
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> The moral of the story is that there's no standard for email, which is (l=
et's face it) a lowest-common-denominator system to begin with. People who=
insist on tilding (like me) use apostrophes next to the letter. Not gorge=
ous, but clear.
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> On the Web, however, there *is* a standard, ISO-8859-1, from the Internat=
ional Standards Organization. It looks awful in raw HTML, but browsers are=
supposed to translate it into the right characters for whatever system the=
browser is running on. The codes all begin with & ampersand and end with =
; semicolon. (Any good HTML or Website editor -- the one I use on the Mac =
is BBEdit -- can convert text from your word processor into the clunkies be=
low. The command is probably "translate special characters" or something l=
ike that. And if your Web pages don't use these codes, they won't look very=
good to Mac or UNIX users.)
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> á
> é
> í
> ó:
> ú
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> uppercase:
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> Á
> É
> etc.
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> e~ne:
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> ñ uppercase: Ñ
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> u-dieresis (as in g"uero; the dieresis is called "umlaut" in German):
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> ü
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> Unfortunately, not all browsers understand the inverted question mark and=
exclamation point (they were apparently not in the original HTML 1.0 stand=
ard, but added later):
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> ¿
> ¡
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> You may also find the copyright character useful (the little circled c):
> ©
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> So, to make a very long story short, in email there really isn't a good
> answer, while on the Web there's a somewhat clumsy but fully functional
> answer.
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> If you need more information, email me back. (I've been around computers=
--
> and using accent marks -- for a long time...)
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> Misha Schutt
> Reference Librarian
> Burbank (Calif.) Public Library
> mishagmcla@aol.com
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> James' addendum:
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> Thank you for the advice, although what I meant is that I do know how to =
get diacritics on Web pages but couldn't be certain that my emails were get=
ting them across. My directory is <A HREF=3D"http://www.citynet.net/persona=
l/ruckle/">, and half the pages are in Spanish, so I know that I can do tho=
se, with the exception you mentioned of HTML 1.0 browsers. The more recent =
browsers will retrieve email through your Web connection so that you can re=
ad them in hypertext and even click on references like the one given above.=
This is probably what we need to move towards globally, and if Lynx accept=
s HTML 2.0 (without graphics) we'll have it made. The most universal standa=
rd appears to be neither Micro nor Mac but (predictably) Unix and AOL's MIM=
E. Since Unix started out life as a clunky mainframe language used by the U=
.S. Department of Defense in the mid-1970s, all computers "speak" it and it=
's the basis for the Internet Protocol. AOL, with its zillion customers on =
all sorts of platforms, had to develop a graphical standard so people could=
send pictures, hence MIME. Before I get rebuked for turning lasnet into a=
technical forum, I'll just say that the jury=20
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