The blog of Kristóf Kovács

How not to mess up encodings

I’m not the kind of pedant guy who always fights for right language, right syntax, or right accenting. In the twentieth century, when there was no standard way to use accents, I wrote my emails, documents, etc even in Hungarian without accents, rather than using the half-cooked solutions that were around, like the multitude of character mappings (for us Hungarians, there were ISO-8859-2 aka Latin-2, ISO-8859-16 aka Latin-16, Windows-1250, CP852, Mac CentralEurRoman, and CP437 that almost had all of our characters). I guess there are nations where it was even worse.