M.-A. Lemburg writes: > "Latin-1" is short for "Latin Alphabet No. 1" [...].
> I assume that since the HTML standard used the more popular > name "Latin-1" for its definition of the default character set > and also made use of the term throughout the spec, it > became the de-facto standard name for that character set > at the time. As usual with de facto standards, it got "embraced and extended". I've seen people seriously contend that Windows-1252 is an "implementation" or (conformant) extension of "Latin-1", and that the EURO SIGN is now a member of "Latin-1". It's just too ambiguous for my taste; I avoid it in discussions of character sets, preferring to be thought idiosyncratic and pedantic. As for the spelling, I think "Latin-1" is slightly more readable than "Latin1", but the latter is in the same degree more typable.<wink> > For much the same reasons, "ISO-10646" never really became > popular, but "Unicode" eventually did. No, there are much more important reasons why "Unicode" became popular. IMHO, as an encoding standard ISO-10646 had a slight edge over Unicode in the early 1990s, before the two were unified as coded character sets. However, as a text processing system there simply was no comparison. Unicode provided a large number of standard facilities, and was clearly set to add to those, that were way outside of the scope of ISO 10646. Claiming Unicode conformance was a much bigger deal than ISO 10646 (not to mention having the "advantage" that you could *optionally* save Intel shorts to disk without swabbing them first). _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com