Re: [idn] IDN's with any ASCII character

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

--On Tuesday, 29 April, 2003 23:21 -0700 Doug Ewell 
<dewell@adelphia.net> wrote:

> There's no such thing as "high ASCII."  ASCII only goes up to
> 0x7F. Everything else is Latin-1 or Unicode or GB 18030 or
> something else, but it can't be called ASCII.
Doug, just in the interest of being precise about this, my 
recollection is that the first US version of "Latin-1" (aka ISO 
8859-1) was formally known as "8 bit ASCII".  The current 
version of "ASCII" -- ANSI/INCITS 4-1986 (formerly X3.4) is 
titled "Information Systems - Coded Character Sets - 7-Bit 
American National Standard Code for Information Interchange 
(7-Bit ASCII)"
The parenthetical note is an artifact of that "... Coded 
Character Sets - 8-Bit American National... document which, if I 
recall, was withdrawn when the US adopted/endorsed ISO 8859-1 
rather than maintaining its own version.

The ANSI (and INCITS) rules about references to withdrawn 
standards are a bit muddy, but to characterize such a reference 
with "can't be called" is excessive.  While, as far as I know, 
"high ASCII" has never been a standard term, "ASCII-8" and 
"8-Bit ASCII" definitely have been.  And both terms are still 
used informally, both inside and outside the US, to refer to the 
Standardized form of Latin-1, i.e., ISO 8859-1.

     john