[thelist] How does one choose a charset?

Vic Wooten vicwooten at eaglewebservices.com
Fri Dec 14 07:01:15 CST 2001


Warren,

----- Original Message -----
From: "Warren Rohner" <warren.bulk at oi.co.za>
To: "Evolt.org List" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 6:43 AM
Subject: [thelist] How does one choose a charset?


> 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. :)

Charset is optional. Basically, it is not necessary to specify a charset at
all, unless you are writing in something other than plain English....the way
I understand it.

Some useful references/interesting reading:

http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/latin1.html

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/chars.html

http://babel.alis.com/codage/index.html

http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.0/spec.html#Charset

HTH,

Vic

> Thanks
> Warren Rohner





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