On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Edward Becerra wrote:

	I'm sorry, but I REALLY have to laugh here. I mean.. after all the
hilarious provincialism on the list there for a while, and now we have an
Australian pleading for people to use an _American_ set standard? No
offence.. but we're really sounding funny. I showed this thread to a
friend, and he laughed so hard, he choked on his tea.

As much as it pains me, an Australian, to admit it, most of the computing
standards have come out of America.  ANSI (The American National Standards
Institute) set up a lot of standards relating to computing.  One of these
is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) which
defines a relation between numbers (which computers deal with) and letters
(which humans deal with) eg 'A' is always '65', '41' and '1000001' (in
decimmal, hexadecimal and binary formats).

Since the internet has grown out of the US's ARPANet (one of the reasons 
why most US addresses *don't* have '.us' on the end), ASCII is used as a 
*base* standard for transferring information.  There is nothing stopping 
anyone from using another system, save that its awkward to do translation 
between systems.

Going back to the original question...

 On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Martin Bennett wrote:

I'm gonna keep this short and sweet...
Why is it that some people on this ML insist on writing in formats
other than US-ASCII standard?! It's *REALLY* annoying when you get a 
fic and half the characters are all graunched! ;} 

Note that my fellow Aussie (even if he is a Victorian ;) ) is requesting 
some sort of standard in textual formats for fics here. 

                                      ~~~~~
                     The Chaotic Trickster - kergma@sv.net.au
      (Secretly, its 'Australian Standard Code for Information Interchange')