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Subject: 
Re: URL characters
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.publish
Date: 
Sat, 31 Jul 1999 09:08:02 GMT
Viewed: 
4987 times
  
Jacob Sparre Andersen skrev i meddelandet ...
Todd Lehman:

Wow.  OK, that certainly makes sense.  So, the hypothesis is that "~" may
have been disallowed so that commonly available software (which used "~" • for
special formatting tricks) for certain languages didn't have to be altered
to parse-recognize URLs and avoid converting "~" in those cases?  In other
words, it may have been a legacy thing for backward compatibility with
existing text processing tools?

It works like I described (at least the ~n case) even in
Word97/Win95(DK), so I am not sure it is correct to call it
a "backward" compatibility problem[1]. People have to learn
to type <tilde> <space> to get a tilde on most European
PC's.



It has nothing to do with different software (MS or others), it's in the
keyboard driver (OK, that's probably MS). On a Swedish keyboard '~' is a 'dead
char', which is automatically composed with the next char if it's possible.
This has been so (at least) since the first PC-keyboard.

I suppose this is defined somewhere in some ISO-standard (don't remember the
number right now :-)

The other 'dead-chars' on my keyboard are ´ (acute accent), ` (grave accent)
and ¨ (trema)

Despite this, all (?) Swedish ISP:s use the tilde in user names (see sig.)

I think the main problem is that US keyboards/users doesn't care for the rest
of the world, while the rest of the world have to care both for themselves and
the US.
(On of my pet peeves: US chauvinism...)

--
Anders Isaksson, Sweden
BlockCAD:  http://user.tninet.se/~hbh828t/proglego.htm
Gallery:   http://user.tninet.se/~hbh828t/gallery.htm



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: URL characters
 
(...) Me too -- I know what you mean. And the cluelessness about non-U.S. conventions is IMHO even worse than the chauvinism... One thing to remember, though: The A in ASCII does stand for American. :-) Say, I've got a user-interface question about (...) (25 years ago, 2-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: URL characters
 
(...) Wow. OK, that certainly makes sense. So, the hypothesis is that "~" may have been disallowed so that commonly available software (which used "~" for special formatting tricks) for certain languages didn't have to be altered to parse-recognize (...) (25 years ago, 26-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)

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