Front page uses windows-1252, shouldn't it be iso-8859-1?

I received this question:

I use Frontpage for my webpage design and FP automatically inserts the meta tag "<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">".
 
Should I have reference to ISO-8859-1 ?

I'm not a front page expert, and I can't answer all questions like this, however this is an common confusion.  Windows-1252 is very similar to ISO-8859-1, but they aren't identical.  Web sites and browsers have historically often treated these as equivilent, but they aren't, which is a great reason to use unicode for your encoding.  (No, I don't know how to make front page use UTF-8, but that'd be the best solution).  Looking on search.live.com (of course) for iso-8859-1 and windows-1252 will find some discussion of the differences.  Wikipedia has some articles (they change so I won't quote them directly, but their encoding related articles are usually informative and often accurate.)

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 13, 2008
  PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/front-page-uses-windows-1252-shouldnt-it-be-iso-8859-1/

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2009
  Thanks Dennis :)  FP users, please do that and make your pages UTF-8 :)

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2010
  BTW, if it looks strange that Windows-1252 was based on a draft of ISO 8859-1, here is a clue: Compare the dates when Windows 1.0 was released to when ISO 8859-1 was finalized.