[Techtalk] locales

[Clayton]

> > Tough question :-)  The short answer is that ISO 8859-1 (and -15) is a
> > subset of UTF-8.
>
> I don't think that's true. ASCII is a subset, ISO 8859-15 isn't, while
> 1 might be I'm not sure.

ISO8859-15 is ISO8859-1 with some changed bits to include a couple
extra chars.. the one most people note is the Euro symbol.

As for the subset thing, we are both right depending on how you look
at it.  It you are referring to encoding.. then UTF-8 and ISO8859 are
not related at all.  The encoding is completely different... but... if
you look at the character set starting with plain ASCII... ISO8859
contains all the characters included in the ASCII set plus extras...
and UTF-8 contains all the characters in ISO8859 plus extras... that
is what I meant when I said ISO8859 was a subset of UTF-8  :-)

There is some good information here under the heading "A Brief
History" if anyone is interested in the geeky details.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-web-character-encoding/2

C