RE: msxsl encoding bug?

> not sure where I got the idea that ANSI was an early implementation of
> ISO-8859-1 that came out before the standard was finished. 
> 

I suspect the real story is probably that there was a lot of high-level
discussion within Microsoft about the need to move away from proprietary
(IBM) character sets to standardized character sets, with many people
participating who had never read an ISO or ANSI spec in their lives: the
term "ANSI" was used as a short-hand for "standardized character sets" and
it stuck, even though the thing that Microsoft eventually delivered had some
proprietary additions that they couldn't resist, and even though it's
patently absurd to call a character set ANSI when ANSI has published more
character sets than it has had hot dinners. The reason they called it ANSI
rather than ISO was presumably that ANSI has much higher brand recognition
in the US - ISO standards were (are?) always rebadged by ANSI for
distribution in the US. (Also, the word "international" is used in Microsoft
to mean "non-American").

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/