[thelist] How does one choose a charset?

[Warren Rohner]

Hi all

I have a quick question, and it's something that I've always been curious 
about. With all the many various charsets out there, how does one go about 
deciding which to use at the top of Web documents? What are the 
distinctions say, between using US-ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1? How 
important is it to be accurate in your selection of a charset?

Maybe someone could help me by answering this once and for all. :)

Thanks
Warren Rohner