Euro

> Again, Tomás, the character you want to add is not called
EURO-CURRENCY
> SIGN, but EURO SIGN. You should correct your document to reflect this.
The
> EURO-CURRENCY SIGN refers not to the Euro, but to the ECU, a different
> currency.

There is some kind of confussion.  In the book "The Unicode
Standard, Version 2.0" is the following:

      20A0    CE    EURO-CURRENCY SIGN

in the glyph CE the characters are interlaced and the E is lower.
I do *not* want to add any character, just Unicode to indicate that
the correct glyph is the "E" with the parallel middle "=" (have a look
to http://europa.eu.int/euro.html).

I first notice this in Sep96 in San Jose when the book was released and
I commented on it.

It is reasonable to assume that the position 20A0 is for the EURO and
not
for the ECU according the name given.

Question: does position 20A0 for the ECU or EURO ?

Because if the position 20A0 if for the ECU, this is really confusing.

Regarding the currencies my understanding is:

The ECU (European Currency Unit) is a basket of currencies of several
European Union national currencies.  It exist today.

The EURO is the currency (*not* a basket) that will come into
existance on the 1 January 1999 (i.e., it does *not* exist today). The
ECU will be change one to one with the EURO and the ECU will disappear.
They will be no co-habitacion ECU/EURO.  But there will be a
co-habitacion of the EURO with some national currencies that will
disappear at a latter date.

The officila line is in the URL above.

>Your proposal to modify ASCII is not acceptable to anyone. ASCII is
ASCII.
>You can't change or delete characters from it. You can, as has been
stated,
>derive a new coded character set from ISO 646, and you can replace the
>VERTICAL BAR in it if you wish. When you register that coded character
set
>in ISO 2375, then it will be usable in an ISO 2022 environments.

Formally and following Larry posting, I propose *defining a new*
character
set.  Not *re-defining* ASCII.  User will chose whatever character set
they
wish.  I assume that the one that need the EURO in 7 and 8 bits will
choose
the new one.  I belive this is the easiest and cheapest way to  do it.

Hopefully, most users will move to Unicode, so they can ignore ASCII
ESCII (the new charset), Latin1, etc.

>Your proposal to replace the VERTICAL BAR in Latin 1 will have no
support
>from anyone anywhere, I think. However, a new part of 8859 has been
>proposed in SC2/WG3 which will contain the EURO SIGN in either the
position
>of the PLUS-MINUS sign or the CURRENCY SIGN (it seems to be
controversial
>and hopefully will be resolved by the current ballot on the CD.

This not solve the 7 bits problem.

>I forgot to mention that the TC304 Euro Workshop did agree that an HTML
>entity would be useful, but thought that it might be nice if it were
&EUR;
>instead of € as this is shorter and mnemonic to the 3-letter
currency
>code.

I do not mind one way or another.  I take note and I if there is no
major
negative feedback, I will change the document accordingly.

Who will take it up formally with W3C ?

Regards
Tomas

Received on Monday, 20 October 1997 12:45:24 UTC