Telling Terms

[Dan Strychalski <dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw>]

The W3C [1] is jointly hosted by MIT/LCS [2] in the U.S., INRIA [3] in
Europe, and Keio University in Japan. I cannot find any document anywhere
that describes MIT's role vis-a-vis the W3C as anything but that of host.

At the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 3, Bill Gates
asserted that the W3C is "managed by MIT."

The Windows character set is an adaptation of a character set referred to
around the world as ISO 8859-1 [4]. As is common among standards bodies,
ANSI [5] publishes a similarly named standard, ANSI/ISO 8859-1-1987, that
can be assumed to be identical to ISO 8859-1 (it is certainly not likely
to contain the East European characters found in Microsoft's set).

Microsoft never refers to its adaptation as anything but "the ANSI
character set."

Governments and educational institutions around the world would do well
to think on these things before entering into agreements with Microsoft.
I personally think a different Rolling Stones song would have been more
appropriate than "Start Me Up" for the W95 rollout: "Under My Thumb."

Dan Strychalski                                dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw

[1] World Wide Web Consortium
[2] Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science
[3] Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
[4] ISO (EYE-so), the International Organization for Standardization
[5] American National Standards Institute, the U.S. member body of ISO