Criticism
Many older character encodings, except Unicode, suffer from several problems.
- Some code page vendors insufficiently document the meaning of all code point values. This decreases the reliability of handling textual data through various computer systems consistently.
- Some vendors add proprietary extensions to some code pages to add or change certain code point values. For example, byte \x5C in Shift JIS can represent either a back slash or a yen currency symbol depending on the platform.
- In order to support several languages in a program that does not use Unicode, the code page used for each string/document needs to be stored.
Due to Unicode's extensive documentation, vast repertoire of characters and stability policy of characters, these problems are rarely a concern for Unicode.
Applications may also mislabel text in Windows-1252 as ISO-8859-1. Fortunately, the only difference between these code pages is that the code point values used by ISO-8859-1 for control characters are instead used as additional printable characters in Windows-1252. Since control characters have no function in HTML, web browsers tend to use Windows-1252 rather than ISO-8859-1.
Read more about this topic: Code Page
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