From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu Oct 27 2005 - 09:29:46 CST
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On Behalf
> Of Jukka K. Korpela
> First, the abbreviation "ANSI", when used to denote a character code,
> is a misnomer. There was once a draft by the American National
Standards
> Institute. Microsoft created its own version of "Latin 1" and started
> calling it "ANSI", but the ANSI never approved it. The Microsoft code
> commonly called "ANSI" is properly called "windows-1252" (the official
> MIME encoding name) or "Windows Latin 1" (a common descriptive name).
A slight clarification: Jukka has the history correct, but there's more
to be said about how "ANSI" is used in the context of Windows APIs. The
term "ANSI" is used with two different meanings. It originated in
reference to Windows code page 1252, and informally people often use
"ANSI" to mean Windows code page 1252. With the development of Win32,
however, it took on a new meaning: it is also used to mean *any* of the
Windows single-byte or multi-byte codepages that can be used in "A"
interfaces. Today, with Win32 already 10+ years old, the latter sense is
probably more appropriate.
One interesting quirk: in Windows, UTF-8 (code page 65001) and UTF-7
(code page 65000) can be considered "ANSI" code pages.
Peter Constable
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