ISO 8859 and Proprietary Adaptions
Eventually, ISO released this standard as ISO 8859 describing its own set of eight-bit ASCII extensions. The most popular was ISO 8859-1, also called ISO Latin1, which contained characters sufficient for the most common Western European languages. Variations were standardized for other languages as well: ISO 8859-2 for Eastern European languages and ISO 8859-5 for Cyrillic languages, for example.
One notable way in which ISO character sets differ from code pages is that the character positions 128 to 159, corresponding to ASCII control characters with the high-order bit set, are specifically unused and undefined in the ISO standards, though they had often been used for printable characters in proprietary code pages, a breaking of ISO standards that was almost universal.
Microsoft later created code page 1252, a compatible superset of ISO 8859-1 with extra characters in the ISO unused range. Code page 1252 is the standard character encoding of western European language versions of Microsoft Windows, including English versions. ISO 8859-1 is the common character encoding used by the X Window System, and most Internet standards.
Read more about this topic: Extended ASCII
Famous quotes containing the word proprietary:
“Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.”
—David Lehman (b. 1948)