--On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 10:54 -0400 "Worley, Dale R (Dale)" <dworley@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> From: Yoav Nir [ynir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] >> >> Very appropriate for XKCD to post this just a few days before >> an IETF meeting. >> >> http://www.xkcd.com/927/ > > And yet sometimes a standard will sweep away everything that > was before it. If "sweep away" is something that occurs after many years of competing standards and a long period of time in which the outcome was not clear, then sure. If you believe that either ASCII or TCP/IP quickly "swept away" its predecessors, you need to review the actual history. See below. > One remarkably successful case is "ASCII" (containing the 26 > letter neo-Latin alphabet used by (only) the English language, > ten digits, and a couple of dozen punctuation marks), which > seems to be contained within every character code in common > use. Many linguists and orthographers would dispute whether the letters of ASCII are sufficient to write English as well as your assertion that there are no other languages that can be written effectively in that set of characters. But ASCII, especially if you mean the encoding typically used today (seven bits right justified in an eight bit field with a leading zero bit), took a number of years to win out over several other coded character sets and encodings. > Another is the "Internet Protocol", a networking scheme that > differed from its many competitors by not being sponsored by > any networking company. And that appeared to be so much at risk for a while --well before it was generally established-- that the IETF actually had an Area dedicated to OSI transition as well as several standards for how to do it. > > I really do believe that in 1,000 years, a section of any good > "history of computer technology" book will explain why a > certain few letter-forms are segregated into the first 128 > locations in the character code. I would predict that, if there are three such books, there may be four different explanations with the largest variations reflecting whether or not the authors understood 10646 DIS-1 and what they think of its implications. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf