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:
“The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood.”
—Mary Mcleod Bethune (1875–1955)
“1st Witch. When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2nd Witch. When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
3rd Witch. That will be ere set of sun.
1st Witch. Where the place?
2nd Witch. Upon the heath.
3rd Witch. There to meet with Macbeth.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“[Allegory] should ... be very sparingly practised, lest, whilst the writer plays with his own fancies and diverts himself by cutting the air with his wide spread wings, he should soar out of view of his readers, leaving them in confusion and perplexity to explore his viewless track.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)