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NOF7.5UG~1.BOO Page 521 Thursday, January 21, 1904 11:14 PM
APPENDIX
Working with Character
Sets
AE
In the past, most computers used the same character set to represent upper and
lowercase English language letters, number characters, and punctuation characters.
This character set is known as ASCII. However, ASCII is a very limited character
set, unable to support a variety of alphabets. To accommodate computer users
worldwide, different character sets were developed. These new character sets are
often identified by a number, such as code page 850 or ISO-8859-1.
Character sets are composed of code points, which are the numbers assigned to
characters that the computer uses to identify the character. For example, in ASCII,
when you type a capital A, the computer sees its code point, which is the number
65; if you type a B, the computer sees a 66. Both the code page 850 and the ISO8859-1 character sets include accented characters, but 850 uses the code point 130
for the character é, and 8859-1 uses 233 for the same character. To eliminate this
confusion, an effort is underway to create a universal character set that includes
every character from every language. This character set is called Unicode.
Characters display correctly in NetObjects Fusion because they are stored in
Unicode. When NetObjects Fusion publishes or previews a page, it converts the text
from Unicode to the character set selected for the site or for the individual page.
Suppose you type Greek characters on a page, set the page character set to Western
European (ISO-8859-1), and preview the page. Because their particular code points
do not have equivalents in the Western European character set, the Greek characters
may appear as question marks. If you want to guarantee that the Greek characters
on the NetObjects Fusion page display correctly when you preview or publish, you
should choose a character set that includes Greek characters. This character set is
then inserted in the charset parameter in the generated HTML META tag, which
tells the browser how to interpret and display the characters.
If you have a page that contains languages that use different character sets, for
example, English on the right and Greek on the left, to guarantee that all characters
will be interpreted correctly by the browser, you can use Unicode (UTF-8) or twobyte Unicode (UCS-2) as a character set for the page. Remember that Unicode is
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