Re: [xml-dev] RE: Encoding charset of HTTP Basic Authentication

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

 >A lot of this stuff was still relatively new, and only a few people 
were thinking of non-European or non-Latin-alphabet languages.

I don't think that's true. Vast numbers of people were thinking about 
them, but they weren't in California, and no-one in California took any 
notice. Before the internet, the level of ignorance in the US about 
anything happening outside the US was staggering. The amazing thing is 
that HTTP/HTML ever made it across from Switzerland.

(Just consider: why did Microsoft, for many years, refer to Latin-1 as 
"ANSI"? Answer: because that's what it said on the cover of the copy 
that they acquired. ISO standards in those days were published in the US 
with an ANSI rebranding. Microsoft were not only ignorant that it was an 
international standard rather than an American one, they were also 
clearly unaware that there were zillions of other ANSI standards.)

Michael Kay
Saxonica