Latin 1 is NOT superset of ASCII

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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 94 12:50:29 EDT
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From: Murray Maloney <murray@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Latin 1 is NOT superset of ASCII
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Strictly speaking, Latin-1 is not a superset of ASCII.
(See my previous mail where I provide a description of
ISO 8859/1 and its relation to ISO 646 and ISO 6937/2.)

It can be both confusing and unfortunate to refer to ASCII.
Most of us understand that ASCII and ISO 646 are essentially
equivalent, except for the names of the control characters.
However, it is ISO 646 that is used in the SGML declaration.

This is a big sticking point with me.  There have been several
computer vendors over the years who have promulgated the myth
of an 8-bit character set that they each call U.S. ASCII.
Each character set is a little bit different and you couldn't
be certain that a file encoded with the char set on one machine
would read correctly on another.

To allay my concerns and to be very precise about what character
sets and encodings are valid within HTML and WWW, I suggest that
we refer only to ISO standards such as ISO 646, ISO 8859/1, and 
ISO 6937/2.