Windows-1252

Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. Initially the same as ISO 8859-1, it began to diverge starting in Windows 2.0 by adding additional characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F (hex) range (the ISO standards reserve this range for C1 control codes). Notable additional characters include curly quotation marks and all printable characters from ISO 8859-15. It is the most-used single-byte character encoding in the world. As of September 2026 (effectively) 9.3% of static web pages are served as Windows-1252 (and even more used of some subtypes or categories, see below). This contrasts a lot with only 0.2% of all websites declared using Windows-1252 even when adding the 0.8% declared to use ISO 8859-1, which is treated as Windows-1252 by all modern browsers (as required by the HTML5 standard), for a total of 1.0%, explained by the fact most web sites are served programmatically and/or usually with a mix of static pages. Almost all websites now use the multi-byte character encoding UTF-8, another superset of ASCII. Some countries or languages show a higher usage than the global average, in 2026 Brazil according to website use, use is at 1.4%, and in Germany at 2.1%. (these are the sums of ISO-8859-1 and CP-1252 declarations). HTML5 is the latest standard that almost all web pages use, but regarding older standards: 6.0% of HTML Transitional web pages use Windows-1252 (HTML Transitional is used by 2.9% of all the websites). For the obsolete and little used frameset site element using websites (0.2% of all), 12.8% use Windows-1252. So it can be said that these legacy encodings are more used with older technology, and HTML5 mostly...