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

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Peter Flynn scripsit:

> So eventually you get down to the third factor: judgement, which is 
> based on knowledge and a shedload of other things.                  

"Good judgement is a matter of experience, and experience is a matter of
bad judgement."

> 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. The ŵ character (wcirc), which is used
> daily by 3 million Welsh speakers didn't appear to get a look in until
> Latin-2.

There's internal evidence that Latin-[1234] were designed together.
Specifically, if a character appears in more than one of these sets, it
always appears at the same code point.

> Perhaps we can learn from history for once :-)

"Papa Hegel he say that we learn from history that we learn nothing from
history.  *I* know people who can't learn from what happened last week."
--Chad C. Mulligan.

-- 
Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural,               John Cowan
Value constraints we / Express on the fly."                 cowan@ccil.org
Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible     http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Abracadabralike / schemas must die!"