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RE: ANSI encoding
- From: "Michael Kay" <michael dot h dot kay at ntlworld dot com>
- To: <xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com>
- Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 09:03:18 +0100
- Subject: RE: [xsl] ANSI encoding
- Reply-to: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
>
> What's the <?xml version="1.0" encoding=""?> encoding=""
> string for ANSI?
>
"ANSI" is the American National Standards Institute, but when used to
describe a character set, you probably mean one of the proprietary
Microsoft Windows character sets.
(Why did they call it ANSI? It's a long story. The original IBM PC
character set was a million miles from conforming to any standard.
Windows (was it 3.1?) made a big step towards adopting international
standards, but Microsoft hadn't quite grasped what conformance meant at
that stage. Anyway, the book of international standards that they picked
up was published in the US by ANSI, so that's what they called it, even
though the standards were mainly European in origin, and even though
they modified them).
Unless you use the special Microsoft characters in positions x80-x9f, or
a codepage other than the Western European one, you can specify
encoding="iso-8859-1", which most XML parsers will accept, although they
aren't obliged to.
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@ntlworld.com
work: Michael.Kay@softwareag.com
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