Talk:ASCII

"glass TTY"

At least in the PDP-10 community, the name "glass TTY" did not mean any display terminal; it was a derogatory name for a display that did not support moving the cursor to an arbitrary position, overwriting characters, and deleting characters. Such terminals were viewed as no better than a Teletype, since they couldn't support Emacs. --Briankharvey (talk) 19:37, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Base64 ?

Maybe give a little nod toward Base64, that it was developed to pass through all the old encodings. Since you could mostly be sure of A-Z a-z 0-9. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.232.167.4 (talk) 10:05, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Incomprehensible without a working knowledge of the subject

What. Who. Why. When.

Instantly dives into detail.

What is this? In simple English.

Then who.

Why.

When.

And then technobabble about line output between different types of printer and the very specific details you think are important but actually make this opaque gibberish. Dustek (talk) 23:37, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 25 May 2021

Change "Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960" to "Work on the ASCII standard began in May 1961".

The only sources I've been able to find that refer to 1960 reference this Wikipedia page. Other sources tend to use 1961; (http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/06/1963.idg/, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3838845.stm) KwiiHours (talk) 05:21, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

 Done Melmann 10:22, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 October 2021

change binary 1101001 = hexadecimal 69 to binary 0101001 = hexadecimal 69 82.77.10.144 (talk) 20:35, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

 Not done: Why, when that would be untrue? ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:43, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Once again, try to change those hideous character tables

My previous attempts were reverted, but really this is pretty bad. Trying again, in this case the table is copied and designed to match the Unicode code block tables (such as {{Unicode chart C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement}}), which are used approximately 300 times and therefore are MORE popular than the "chset" tables! So any claim that this is "not standard" is false.

Features:

• Much smaller
• No confusing Unicode numbers. Instead they Unicode assignment, with the name, is in the tooltip.
• No hideous and useless colors that act like it is important to tell people whether a symbol is a number or letter or punctuation, as though they can't tell.
• With the removal of the colors, colors can now be used for more interesting things, such as pointing out differences to other sets. This is much easier to see than the checkerboard overlay, and not ambiguous like the boxes.

Please put comments here. Do not revert unless you have a clear, concise explanation of exactly what "essential" information is missing, and type it here.Spitzak (talk) 05:28, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

One comment: Tooltips are pretty much a no-go for Wikipedia, aren't they? They are an accessibility issue, see MOS:NOTOOLTIPS, and they just don't work with a mobile interface or a tablet. However, the Unicode equivalent character is not essential information, so I guess that's OK. – Tea2min (talk) 07:27, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't see any other practical way to put the full Unicode name in, and that is far more useful than just the Unicode code point number. Also allows other information such as decimal values (as shown in the newest revision). A user can hit "edit" on a phone if for some unfathonable reason they actually need this info, in fact even before this was the most practical way to extract it, even on a machine where tooltips work.Spitzak (talk) 20:20, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

If the character as displayed in the box is a link, the tooltips don't work, at least in Safari - the link target itself is the tooltip. E.g., hovering over NUL displays "Null character", not "0 U+0000: Control (alias NULL) (alias NUL)", as the tooltip.

(Also, this edit, with the edit summary "drop weird linefeed characters from table", removed the newline that put the decimal codes on a separate line in the tooltip from the Unicode value and character name.) Guy Harris (talk) 04:54, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

For me the tooltip works if you point near the edge of the box and off of the link, this is in Chrome. I have been removing "useless" links, in particular to the box drawing characters. Certainly the Unicode page designers argued quite a bit about the links interfering with the tooltips. I may put the newlines back, as it sounds like they work on Windows, I'm asking why he thought they should be removed. I have not found any other way to get a newline into the tooltip, any ideas? I may put a template in, however.Spitzak (talk) 17:38, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Putting the mouse pointer outside the box pops up the explanatory tooltip in Safari as well, but I don't count "If you put the mouse pointer outside the box, you get the explanatory tooltip rather than the link tooltip" as "working" in a useful sense; it's bad enough that you have to know about the tooltip to get that information, having to know that if the character is a control character, you have to know where to get that tooltip makes it worse. Tooltips aren't all that discoverable in the UI sense.

"if for some unfathonable reason they actually need this info" doesn't exactly suggest confidence that the information is useful. Guy Harris (talk) 18:39, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Backspace to form diacritics.

This article should perhaps somehow mention the ability of many old-school printers to form diacritics etc. using backspace. Since ascii does not have characters like "é". E.g.:

é = e backspace '

e = e backspace e

e = e backspace _

212.178.135.35 (talk) 11:40, 2 August 2022 (UTC)