Re: Windows and Mac character encoding questions

Deke Smith wrote:
> 
> One source said that Windows uses ISO-8859-1 for its English-language
> system, then I saw a thread about the Windows-1252 encoding and how it
> differs from ISO-8859-1.

Windows uses a superset of ISO-8859-1 called CP 1252, aka
"windows-1252".

> Does Windows 3.x/DOS use the same encoding as Windows 95/98?

Windows 3.x probably uses a subset of the current CP 1252, but still a
superset of ISO-8859-1. CP 1252 has been growing over the years. DOS
uses a number of different code pages. For English, if I remember
correctly, it uses mostly CP 937.

> I have read
> that WinNT uses Unicode, but is the default encoding under the English
> language system different than the other flavors of Win/DOS?

Windows NT uses Unicode internally and in the file system. But you can
still use CP 1252 files, such as text files and HTML files.

> IANA lists
> "Windows-1250", "Windows-1254", etc. but does not list our friend,
> "Windows-1252".

Microsoft registered all the windows-125x charsets, and tried to
register windows-1252 too, but for some reason that hasn't happened.

> On the Mac, the English encoding is called "MacRoman" by the browsers,
> news clients and email clients. IANA does not list "MacRoman" as an
> encoding scheme, instead it lists, "Macintosh". Which is the acceptable
> usage?

As far as the charset name is concerned, "macintosh" is correct from
IANA's point of view. Netscape only supports the name "x-mac-roman".

However, from the interoperability point of view, it might be better not
to use Mac Roman on the Net. ISO-8859-1 is used much more widely.

Erik

Received on Friday, 28 August 1998 12:49:08 UTC