> I should not be surprised by your statement, but I am. It is distressing
to
think that something that by definition should not be rocket science --
repertoires of abstract characters mapped directly to specific bit patterns
-- would be subject to such haphazard definition and even more haphazard
implementation.
Backwards compatibility stroke. As vendors changed the mappings, they kept
the same names so that they would not have to update software to use the new
names. Typically the changes are thought to enhance the encoding, and people
want everybody to benefit (isn't that ironic?). Shift_JIS is my favorite
incompatible charset. And just think of things like putting the Euro sign in
a bunch of encodings w/o changing their names, or of when Windows-1252 was
advertised as iso-8859-1 for interoperability purposes... It's a dangerous
world ;)
YA
