On Thursday, 11 September 2025, 05:23:28 (-04:00), Martin J. Dürst wrote:
So *my proposal* is to change the first paragraph of the note to: ==== These are the official names for character sets that may be used in the Internet and may be referred to in Internet documentation. The character set most commonly used in the Internet and used especially in protocol standards is US-ASCII, this is strongly encouraged. The use of the name US-ASCII is also encouraged. ====
Please fix the ugly comma splice, at least.
While I'm sure that a careful comparison between these two versions will bring up many differences of interest to a historian, there are no essential differences in the allocation of characters to code points. The most noticeable difference is the use of a broken line glyph for the "VERTICAL LINE" character in 1968, which became a single line in 1986. But this is irrelevant for us, because none of the charset names contains a '|', and because glyph variants wouldn't be relevant anyway.
So the conclusion for whether we use the 1968 version or the 1986 version is that it doesn't matter (assuming we use any version at all).
There were some changes made since the 1968 edition. I can't say with certainty whether they materially affect the official names, but the 1968 edition permitted "dualities" in certain characters. That is, different interpretations of some code points, such as $ possibly being a different currency. In particular, Appendix D of the 1986 edition describes the standard's own history and important changes. In my opinion, for clarity and certainty, the reference should be to "ANSI X3.4-1986". That *is* US-ASCII as it is used and understood today. INCITS republished the standard but I don't believe they ever made any changes aside from adding their own cover page. Sławomir Osipiuk