Encoding on the Internet

4: Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1)

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The Latin-1 Internet Standard

"Latin 1" or ISO-8859-1 is the standard 8-bit encoding for Western European languages on the Internet. The names comes from:

• "Latin" - For the Latin or Roman alphabet which is what English and other Western European languages use
• I.S.O. - International Organization for Standardization (Geneva), www.iso.ch
• 8859 - Designating encoding standards (as opposed to camera speeds or other standards)
• 1 - The first encoding standard registered at the ISO

Charts of Latin 1 are available at:

• Mats Tande - www.gar.no/home/mats/8859-1.htm
• Kosta Kostis - www.kostis.net/charsets/iso8859.1.htm

NOTE: Some Web sites displaying encoding charts mistakenly refer to the entire Latin-1 character set as "ASCII" because characters #0-127 of Latin 1 are the same ASCII. However, characters #128-255 with all the accented letters are NOT in ASCII. If you open an ASCII text file, accented letters are generally missing.

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Windows-1252 & Latin 1

The Windows-1252 encoding system is almost (but not quite) identical to Latin 1.  Specifically Windows-1252 character numbers #128-159 do not exist in Latin 1. There are other differences as well.

Websites encoded as Windows-1252 (such as those created by Front Page) may exhibit minor quirks, especially when viewed on non-Windows platforms.

 

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Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.

Last Modified: Thursday, 26-Jul-2007 16:01:42 EDT