Character Set Confusion
Because these ASCII extensions have so many variants, it is necessary to identify which set is being used for a particular text for it to be interpreted correctly. However, because the most-used characters (those in ASCII, the seven-bit code points) are common to all sets—even most proprietary ones—failure to correctly identify a character set often suffers no adverse consequences if the user is typing in English. Further, because many Internet standards use ISO 8859-1, and because Microsoft Windows (using the code page 1252 superset of ISO 8859-1) is the dominant operating system for personal computers today, unannounced use of ISO 8859-1 is quite commonplace, and may generally be assumed without evidence to the contrary.
In many protocols, most importantly e-mail and HTTP, the character encoding of content has to be tagged with IANA-assigned character set identifiers.
Read more about this topic: Extended ASCII
Famous quotes containing the words character, set and/or confusion:
“A faithful lover is a character greatly out of date, and rarely now used but to adorn some romantic novel, or for a flourish on the stage. He passes now for a man of little merit, or one who knows nothing of the world.”
—Anonymous, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. Weekly Visitor or Ladies Miscellany, p. 20 (April 1803)
“To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Behind her was confusion in the room,
Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has parlor, bedroom,
And dining room thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)