Sam Heywood,
Your upper ASCII characters didn't come out right viewed in us-ascii, as your
header specified:
>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
>
Maybe you should have specified ISO-8859-1? I believe HTML allows specifying
extended characters symbolically, something like u-umlaut, e-acute; I don't have
the syntax reference in front of me. Even in English text, we have words
taken from other languages like caf� (or should it be caf� ?) and �ame (first
letter is supposed to be lower-case n-tilde). My guess is that, since computer
technology was developed mainly in the U.S.A., the ethnocentric thought was that
English is the language spoken by civilized people, thus no need for umlauts,
acute accents, etc.
I believe languages using the Roman alphabet with diacritical marks can already
exceed 8-bit ASCII, and then there are some other alphabets (Cyrillic, Hebrew,
Arabic, Persian, Greek, maybe others), and non-alphabets (Chinese, Japanese,
Korean). Also, copyright symbols, trademark/service mark, euro, British pound
and other currency symbols, etc.
Thomas Mueller
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
