There’s good article by the W3C called Personal names around the world that explains the problems (and possible solutions) pretty well (it was originally a two-part blog post by Richard Ishida: part 1 and part 2) Personally I’d say: support every printable Unicode-Character and to be safe provide just a single field “name” that contains … Read more
First, the easy cases: ASCII If your data contains no bytes above 0x7F, then it’s ASCII. (Or a 7-bit ISO646 encoding, but those are very obsolete.) UTF-8 If your data validates as UTF-8, then you can safely assume it is UTF-8. Due to UTF-8’s strict validation rules, false positives are extremely rare. ISO-8859-1 vs. windows-1252 … Read more
Vertical tab was used to speed up printer vertical movement. Some printers used special tab belts with various tab spots. This helped align content on forms. VT to header space, fill in header, VT to body area, fill in lines, VT to form footer. Generally it was coded in the program as a character constant. … Read more
The header just denotes what the content is encoded in. It is not necessarily possible to deduce the type of the content from the content itself, i.e. you can’t necessarily just look at the content and know what to do with it. That’s what HTTP headers are for, they tell the recipient what kind of … Read more
ANSI encoding is a slightly generic term used to refer to the standard code page on a system, usually Windows. It is more properly referred to as Windows-1252 on Western/U.S. systems. (It can represent certain other Windows code pages on other systems.) This is essentially an extension of the ASCII character set in that it … Read more