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:
“Pity the man who has a character to support—it is worse than a large family—he is silent poor indeed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All I’m telling you is that that little creature in there has as much right to live as you do. Don’t forget, you invaded his world. You sank a pipe six miles into the ground and when he climbed up you set dogs on him, shot him.”
—Richard Fielding, and Lee Sholem. Superman (George Reeves)
“A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone
Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)