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:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“When heaven and earth were in confusion hurl’d
For the debated empire of the world,
Which awed with dreadful expectation lay,
Soon to be slaves, uncertain who should sway:”
—Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)