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

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

 >Soften it a little and consider IBM (I believe: Len? Michael?) who 
were building a precursor to what would eventually become the 
foundations of Latin-1. Right down somewhere near the bottom right-hand 
corner came the ÿ (yuml) character, which is used in French, and mostly 
in the names of some towns, but so rarely that even some French people 
are unaware of it, as I discovered when I asked some French LaTeX 
typesetters.

I believe that the main influence on ECMA-72 which became Latin-1 which 
became iso-8859-1 was actually DEC Multinational, developed for the 
vt220 terminal; though a couple of characters were substituted.

The way in which these decisions are made would be a fascinating study. 
I heard a tale that the IBM PC keyboard layout was dreamt up by a fairly 
junior engineer with no knowledge either of the years of effort to 
standardise keyboard layouts or of the extensive ergonomic and usability 
studies designed to maximize the performance of keyboard users. The 
resulting lost productivity must be costing us billions.

But then, someone has to decide. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans had 
been arguing for years about how to code ideographic characters, and in 
the end Xerox and a few Californian friends decided to tell them the 
answer. My friends in Japan told me they did such a bad job that it 
would never catch on, but they made the same mistake I have so often 
made myself - bad things do catch on.

Michael Kay
Saxonica