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Subject:Re: Polite international e-mail From:"Sandy Harris" <sharris -at- dkl -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Mon, 21 Feb 2000 14:20:32 -0500
Chris Kowalchuk wrote:
> My point is that the ASCII set, which is the basis of "plain text"
> includes the most common (maybe all, but I don't know) accented
> characters for Western European languages.
No, it doesn't. The ASCII standard defines only 128 characters. Various
systems define all 256 possible values of a byte, and PC users routinely
mis-label the 256-character PC set "ASCII", but this is an error.
RFC 2277 is a "best current practices" document on character set usage
on the Internet: