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Excerpts from Joe Shea's message at 10:03 on 24 Aug 96:

> 	How does a big outfit like Harris dvelop a pagination system 
> without taking a tilde into account in its character sets, anyway?  Why 
> is it so few nespapers are capable of using the umlauts and circumflexes 
> and accents aigu and grave that are part of the larger world we have 
> become co lose to now?

This goes back to the early days of ASCII and data transfer in which 
bytes were formatted with 7 data bits and a parity bit, as well as a 
start and stop. The parity bit limited you to 128 characters, and 
this was further limited by the need to insert control characters 
(the first 32 ASCII symbols) and other formatting symbols needed for 
write transmission, principally upper and lower rail, which meant 
boldface and normal font. ANPA-RI also needed separate open and close 
quote keys, but did not need the typewriter "straight" inch and foot 
mark keys.

This gave rise to all manner of style changes in addition to the lack 
of accented characters, at signs and tildes. For example, AP style is 
to quote the name of publications that, in proper style, should be 
italicized. This is because there is no italics command. AP also 
developed the style of using dashes instead of bullets, again because 
ANPA-RI provided for no bullet command.

Most modern publishing systems are NOT incapable of these characters. 
But they often require a bit of adjusting of their output and 
keyboard character maps to obtain them. Part of this is because there 
still is no universally accepted standard for where these characters 
go in the ASCII character set above 128. And at what point do you cut 
off special characters? Do we allow the accents needed for, say, 
Norway and Sweden but exclude the symbols needed for Russia and 
Poland? HTML's &xxx; commands are fine, but not every typeface has 
every character available in the same location. It really is a 
nightmare.

ANPA-RI was a wonderful thing in that it forced adoption of at least 
some standards. Nothing else has come close to that universality. 
Even 8-bit MIME coding is not supported by many systems.
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