Re:The ups and downs of the HTTP header
by wereHamster on Friday December 06, 2013 @07:58AM
(#6860834)
Unicode also has a limited set of characters, mostly those that the unicode consortium has agreed on including in the standard.
Re:The ups and downs of the HTTP header
by Keithamus on Friday December 06, 2013 @08:26AM
(#6860912)
That's splitting hairs - UTF-8 allows for over a million code points, enough to cover pretty much every written language, and then some (including swathes of emoji characters). ISO-8859-1 has 256 code points, barely enough to cover Europe and America.
> Thanks for the clarification about the request line, I'll edit the article to point that out!
(Apparently you weren’t thankful enough to upvote. EDIT: never mind, I must have been mistaken.)
A more accurate description of ISO-8859-1 would be “a crappy 8-bit character set mostly only still relevant for Windows which uses its own embraced and extended version, CP1252.”
I mostly referred to it as a "crappy Windows character set" because A) it has a limited set of characters, mostly Western European, and B) it's pretty much only used by Windows these days. While the term "crappy Windows character set" is not perhaps entirely accurate, it is a short, tongue in cheek summary of ISO-8859-1.