Description

This article is from the Nordic countries FAQ, by Antti Lahelma and Johan Olofsson, with numerous contributions by others.

1.8.2 Pros and cons of the different representations

If you have been a reader of this group for a while, you may have
noticed that discussion about characters and their representations
occasionally accounts for quite a bit of bandwidth. It often does not
take more than a question about the issue from a new reader, or
someone posting an article with an IBM character set, to get a new
thread going on the issue. Some want to keep 7-bit ISO-646 (be aware
that they may call it "true ASCII", although strictly speaking, is
not), since 7-bit codes will always get though with any setup; others
want ISO-Latin-1 since it is more universal; and yet others promote
digraphs as the greatest common denominator between the two.

Some pros and cons for each set:

    Character set:    Advantages:             Disadvantages:
    __________________________________________________________________

    Digraphs          * Requires 7-bit only   * Ambiguous
                                                ("oe" or "o-slash"?)
                                              * Non-optimal compromise
 
    LaTeX             * Non-ambiguous 7-bit   * Made for typesetting;
                        representation.         somewhat cryptic for
                                                regular text.
                                              * Non-optimal compromise
 
    ISO-646-SE,       * Only 7-bit "true"     * Different standards
    ISO-646-DK          representation.         for each language
    <[\]{|}>          * No data loss even     * Getting harder to
                        with old hardware/      find font support
                        software/setup.         (Dying out).
                                              * Shadows the brace,
                                                sqare bracket, pipe,
                                                and backslash chars.
 
    ISO Latin 1       * Utilizes all 8 bits   * Requires 8-bit clean
    (ISO-8859-1)        in a byte; yet avoids   connection; older
    <ÐÞÆØÅÄÖðþæøåäö..>  dangerous codes.        systems may cause
                      * Universal for all       data loss.
                        Western European      * May require some
                        languages.              setup.
                      * Supported by ISO and  * In case of stripping,
                        MIME; true subset of    becomes "FXEDVfxedv";
                        Unicode.                difficult to read.
 
    IBM CodePages     * Uses all 256 codes;   * Uses all 256 codes;
    Machintosh set      more characters         incl. dangerous ones.
    <Unacceptable>    * Often used in PC      * Incompatible with
                        environments such as    the "de-facto" 8-bit
                        BBS'es.                 standard ISO-8859-1
 
    __________________________________________________________________

 

Continue to:

• prev: 1.8.1 How are these represented in Usenet postings and E-mail?
• Index
• next: 1.8.3 How do I set up support for 7-bit ISO-646 representation? ({|}, [\])

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