ISO-Latin-1 Character Set

ISO-Latin-1 Character Set

Characters in Web Pages

Web pages allow you to specify European characters from the ISO Latin-1 Character Set (8859-1). This standard also served as the basis for the ANSI character set of MS Windows, but naturally Microsoft extended and improved their version so that it doesn't exactly follow ISO Latin-1. Only the characters in ISO Latin-1 are guaranteed to be supported on an Internet Web site. When a Web browser, such as Netscape, formats a Web page on a client system, such as Windows, it maps the ISO Latin-1 characters as best it can into the native character set. It may be that some desirable characters such as the Trademark or Copyright can be coded into a Web page and displayed in Windows, but that is only an accident. If the character is not in ISO Latin-1 standard, it appears as garbage on another client system.

There are two ways of specifying extended characters in an HTML document: &#xxx; and &name;

Ampersand, Crosshatch, ISO decimal code, Semicolon

For example, "a" with grave accent is decimal 224 in the ISO Latin character set. Therefore in HTML "à" can be coded as à where 224 is the decimal code in the ISO Latin-1 character set.

Ampersand, Mixed-case name, Semicolon

For example, "a" with grave accent (à) can be coded à in HTML.

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