Talk:ISO/IEC 8859-15

Two charts
There are two comparison charts. Is that needed? 212.242.144.172 12:10, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I presume you mean the chart showing the changes from 8859-1 and the one showing all the characters in 8859-15. They serve different uses.


 * The first chart, part of the section explaining how 8859-15 differs from 8859-1, focuses only on the changes and shows what the corresponding replaced characters are in 8859-1. The full chart could not do this clearly.


 * The full chart enables the whole of 8859-15 to be seen at once, which showing just the changes cannot do. --82.46.154.93 07:28, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh, you probably meant the two almost identical tables that were merged that day. Never mind then. --82.46.154.93 07:32, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

OE in French
My understanding is that OE and oe were in draft versions of ISO 8859-1 and were removed at the prompting of the delegate representing France. His idea was that the ligature was purely typographic. Then there was a new French delegate and, together with the Canadian delegate, they took the position that oe is a letter (I think that the "proof" was to do with collating sequence). But it was too late to fix 8859-1. Since then, the French have been unsupportive of ISO 8859-1. I assume that -15 brings them onside again, but a bit late.

Welsh_alphabet digraphs are still not supported. The rumour was that the British rep didn't remember he was representing Wales. That might be untrue or unfair. I heard a similar story about Basque characters.

This is unsourced second-hand recollection. With supporting information, it might be worth adding here or in ISO/IEC_8859-1. -- 22:04, 11 November 2006) User:DHR


 * It's true enough that ISO 8859-1 was the result of competing balance of national interests, and that the French representatives scuttled the OE/oe ligatures at a late date (whereupon these were somewhat clumsily replaced by multiplication and division signs), but that's not really true of 8859-15 -- 8859-15 (which came 20 years later) was kind of a quick hack to introduce the Euro sign and the non-typographic characters contained in Windows-1252 in order to fill a gap in the transition between 8-bit character sets and Unicode. AnonMoos 22:16, 11 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Coming a little late, but I can add an independent recollection that the ANSI X3/L2 committee, on which I was an observer, included the OE ligature because they thought the French would want it. When the character set was submitted to ISO the French representative vetoed it. We thought it was because France was formally phasing the ligature out of the language, but that may be a misunderstanding of the reason. I also recollect that the British representatives pressed for multiple and divide to be included in the vacant slots, and nobody had any better ideas, resulting in the inelegant intrusions. I was at Prime Computer; we were just rolling out the PT200 terminal at the time and the original ROMs had Œ/œ. We had to redesign them hastily and luckily only a few had shipped. David Brooks (talk) 18:15, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

C0 and C1 control codes part of ISO/IEC 8859-15?
Are the C0 and C1 control codes really part of 8859-15, as the table currently suggests? As this draft says: ''The shaded positions in the code table correspond to bit combinations that do not represent graphic characters. Their use is outside the scope of ISO/IEC 8859; it is specified in other International Standards, for example ISO/IEC 6429.'', with the usual C0 and C1 code points all shaded.

This practise (to not include C0 and C1 in 8859-n) can also be found in the article ISO/IEC 8859-1 (C0 and C1 code points marked unused).

--Abdull 11:39, 7 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Please read the second paragraph of the intro and note the destinction between ISO/IEC 8859-15 (an ISO/IEC standard) and ISO-8859-15 (a mime charset) Plugwash (talk) 09:00, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Adress
I think it's needed to say that this is the character set used for strange symbols on the address bar on web browsers (%20 = space). 84.120.173.177 (talk) 19:22, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * They used to be ISO-8859-1, but nowadays they're UTF-8... AnonMoos (talk) 14:02, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

dubious statement about Y diaresis
I don't think that Œ and œ are French ligatures, and Ÿ is needed in French all-caps text. is the main motivation for introducing these characters. OTOH, it would be nice to mention the languages that really use ÿ, and thus probably also the caps'd version. &mdash; MFH:Talk 17:15, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
 * As vou can read above on this page, the French have even "vetoed against" introducing the oe ligature, on another occasion. In fact, most French people are rather sloppy concerning the use of the ligature.
 * And ÿ isn't used in French words, only in a very very few proper names of places.
 * And in French, diacritic signs are not mandatory on uppercase letters. Eg. most towns do not put accents on the caps'd letters of the city entrance road signs.
 * As far as I can remember from reading a french typesetting book a while back, omitting accents on caps was never sanctioned by any authority but was only the result of the technical difficulties it posed, not just on earlier computers but also in typesetting newspapers. Accents would have required extra spacing on top of capital letters. Quality books have almost always had accentuated caps. But the real importance of “Ÿ” stems from another typographical specificity: last names in French are written in all caps, and accents can't be inferred from this context. Therefore it is needed to be able to write all of the existing French last names.
 * As for “œ,” the story I heard was that the delegate to the commission was from Groupe Bull, which had not implemented it on its existing products. Had it been in the standard, it would have cost them money to implement it. Since it was'nt in common character sets nor on almost any keyboards (except, notably, on Macs and IIRC on Minitels) until recently, it's no surprise we've been 'sloppy' about it. Niczar ⏎  17:52, 4 December 2008 (UTC)


 * The capital Ÿ is needed so that software can "all caps" text without losing information (ie it would have to turn ÿ into Y and that would turn into y if you lower-cased the word later). This is probably a stupid reason but some programmers are really in love with "case independence" so they require this. I think Unicode has added upper case versions of every lowercase composite character for the same reason, no matter how unlikely it is to be used.Spitzak (talk) 01:48, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Hexadecimal values for €, Š, š, Ž, ž, Œ, œ, and Ÿ in ISO/IEC_8859-15?
Looking at e.g. Š, the table says it has a hexadecimal value of 0160. But surely its hexadecimal value is 00A6, since its decimal value is 166? Thue (talk) 15:04, 29 October 2014 (UTC)


 * That's the Unicode code point, not the hex number. You can figure out the hex index by adding the hex at the start of the row and column. The decimal numbers in these tables should be removed for the same reason. And perhaps the unicode code point put into the tooltip so the tables would be much smaller with the characters themselves much more obvious.Spitzak (talk) 01:44, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, the unicode code point is nice to have. But the table should have a legend explaining what it is. Right now it is just unexplained binary inside the table. Thue (talk) 20:27, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Mostly superseded
While these ISO-8859-xx standards cannot exactly be described as obsolete (they will probably be still be in use decades from now in obscure corners of the information-technology world) there should be some indication in the article that they are no longer the best solution to representing characters outside the 7-bit ASCII set. The internet mostly moved to utf-8 years ago. Sayitclearly (talk) 21:56, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Š in loanwords
In Finnish, š is used in loanwords from multiple other languages, including words such as šamaani (shaman) and šekki (cheque). But both shamans and cheques have been obsolete for quite some time. T71024 (talk) 08:10, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Unclear sentence

 * "this encoding is by far most used, close to half the use, by German, though this is the least used encoding for German"

I have no idea what this means. It is really complicated to read and seems to contradict itself. Bmhm (talk) 06:11, 9 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I think it was intended to mean that almost half of the pages declared 8859-15 are in the German language, even though 8859-15 is actually not very commonly used for German... AnonMoos (talk) 13:58, 11 June 2023 (UTC)