What's the windows-1252 character set for?

[verto]

Today I took a little time out to try and find out what the windows-1252 character set is, does, etc., but didn't learn a whole lot. Basically tried various searches, and the most information I got was at this W3C page, which seems to show that most European and Western languages use it as a charset for Web pages in addition to iso-8859-1, and that it includes iso-8859-1.

Other than that, still don't have a clue -- anyone know more about it?

[sde]

this might be unrelated, but could it be that some languages use 2 bytes for each character instead of the 1 byte for each character our language uses?

[verto]

maybe it is, because that's what Unicode's designed to support -- that's another idea (Unicode) for querying the search engines, I guess.

About a year ago, was sitting at a terminal next to a globalization and localization manager who'd recently been laid off from Macromedia, and she was going on about a little of that stuff. Wish I could ask her now, as I bet she'd be able to explain it in a jiffy.