Re: IDN's with any ASCII character

John C Klensin <klensin at jck dot com> wrote:

> The _only_ thing I was trying to clarify was the apparent
> assertion in Doug's note that ASCII-8 wasn't well defined in
> some standard.  It was and is.  I wouldn't suggest using the
> term either.

BTW, to the extent anyone cares, there actually was an encoding called
"ASCII-8" or "USASCII-8" that emerged shortly after the introduction of
ASCII in 1963.  It was not an attempt to extend ASCII to 256 characters,
though, but rather an attempt to represent ASCII in 8-bit streams using
a strange parity-bit-inspired scheme:

ASCII characters 0x00-0x1F were represented by bytes 0x00-0x1F
ASCII characters 0x20-0x3F were represented by bytes 0x40-0x5F
ASCII characters 0x40-0x5F were represented by bytes 0xA0-0xBF
ASCII characters 0x60-0x7F were represented by bytes 0xE0-0xFF

It was based on ASCII-1963, which differs in a few character positions
from the 1967 version we know.  Some other early systems solved the
then-important "parity problem" by making the high bit an odd or even
parity bit.  Eventually, the "8-bit ASCII byte" came to be defined as
having its high bit reset to 0.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/