[Coco] Unicode and MIME (was: Updated accurate memory map)

[James Dessart]

On 10-Jul-04, at 2:02 PM, KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:

>  I wonder why a single apostrophe generates THREE chars -- French
> a-circumflex, Euro-sign, and TM?  Actually, it appears that Euro and 
> TM are separate
> codes here.

and

> Does UTF-8 use 16 bits for extended characters, or is it just the 
> unused
> upper 128 codes of ASCII (which you can get by holding ALT while 
> typing 3 or 4
> digits)?  I guess the "8" answers that :-)

Actually, for ASCII characters, it uses 8 bits. For any unicode 
character that needs more than that, a code is used to initiate an 
extended sequence (in this case, the a-circumflex) and other bytes 
follow. I believe there are unicode characters that require more than 
two bytes.

> Is there any setting I can make in my OS or emailer to make it more 
> likely to
> interpret UTF-8?  Or just hope that the correct MIME headers come thru 
> in
> each email?  I went thru my Control Panel but none of the options seem 
> to apply.

I know there's a setting in mine. It's the Text Encoding, which might 
be set to be ISO Latin. It's usually the default.

> Here's an interesting question:  If you actually see all the 
> MIME-functions
> listed in your received email text, does that mean that your mailer 
> has failed
> to recognize and act on them?  I often get emails with all those MIME 
> headers
> in them visible, and I'm wondering if they shouldn't be hidden 
> whenever the
> mail reader does recognize them?

If you see MIME separators and the like, the mailer hasn't processed 
them. I usually only see this in SPAM.

> Also, why are some keyboards generating a "left apostrophe?"  We 
> already
> have, in ASCII, the back-tick ( ` ) for programmers who need balanced 
> single
> quotes.

It's not the keyboard, it's the software. In some text editing 
software, and I guess emailers, doing a " after a space will give you 
the right quote, and after other characters, the left quote. Same with 
the apostrophe. I hated it when Word used to do that to me... Mac Word 
Version 5 (long time ago) did it, and I turned it off as soon as I 
figured out how.

I had always wondered why ` was used... :) now I know. :)

James