On 2001-05-30 11:27 -0400, James R. Frysinger wrote in USMA:13151:
> Bruce, my browser read your message as ISO-8859-1 so your special
> symbols came out just fine.
>
> The real culprit is that the old default setting for years has been
> ASCII, which provides only 128 characters, inherited from the teletype
> days. Teletypes did not do super- and subscripts! The best they could do
> was to provide a "shift" character set, but that was all on the same
> line. Extended ASCII merely takes advantage of the eighth bit to double
> the number of characters available but nobody ever sat down to pick a
> standard set for those extra characters. Thus each company (Microsoft,
> Apple, et al.) defined their own extended sets. No one company in
> particular is to blame.
I agree that there are many non-standard character sets out there. Are
the ISO-8859-? sets not somewhat standard now? If everyone's e-mail
clients could be set to ISO-8859-1, then, in theory, we could use
superscripts, mu, etc.
On the other hand, I don't mind "m3". It's definitely more universal.
Maybe someday Unicode will solve all these problems. As it is, I have to
reset my character set depending on whether I'm writing in Japanese, or
English with extended characters. Quite the pain, because I usually
forget.
Bruce
