The character set commonly used on the internet for European languages is known as ISO-8859. This standard was issued by the "International Standards Organization" and is copies are available only for purchase. Ten alphabets are currently available, all of which have US-ASCII as characters 0 through 127. ISO 8859 Latin-1 supports Western European languages, but there are nine others. One of the best attempts to capture the various character sets is RFC-1345, available from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for the price of a mouse click.

The most modern method of encoding the thousands of characters from all living (and a number of dead) languages is the Unicode" character set. Unicode is the universally accepted code for the world, and is supported by all major computer hardware and software vendors. Again, the first 128 characters of Unicode are the old original US-ASCII characters. The tilde character: "~" from Spanish), is also included in US-ASCII. The vast majority of characters in US-ASCII are not specific to the US, and include many characters used everywhere - for example the Arabic numerals:   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9   the common math symbols:   + - * / =   and many common and not so common symbols:   . , / ? ' " ; : [ ] { } \ | ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) - _   including the "space" character (#32 decimal or 0x20 in Hex) used to separate words.

This page, your computer (Mac, PC, or Linux) and most of the English-language text that you encounter on the internet use this character set. The table below shows the decimal and Hexadecimal (base 16) character number, what each one looks like in your browser. There is additional information about the first 32 characters and character 127. Character "0" is not usually considered a legal character, and the HTML code may show through.

There is an excellent article on US-ASCII at Wikipedia.

Most of the first 32 characters are obsolescent now. They harken back to the time when single characters were used on data links to start and stop peripherals, indicate the end of paper tapes, eject pages from printers, ring a bell at the other end of the link, and generally control things remotely. The computing world has moved on, but a number of these characters are still widely used, including "Backspace", "Carriage Return", "Line Feed", "Tab: and "escape". Some of them are generally referred to by their alternative names (Control-C for example) and are used in UNIX terminal sessions and for other mostly "techie" purposes.

The use of these characters in UNIX sessions is one reason why Macs (unlike most PCs) have separate "Control" and "Apple/Command" keys. You use the "Apple/Command" key for things like "Copy" (Command-C), "Paste" (Command-V), and "Cut" (Command-X). You use the "Control" key so that you can type "Control Characters" in terminal sessions. On a Mac, this allows the UNIX terminal window and other such "tech toys" to use the normal key combinations for functions like "Cut and Paste" without compromising the ability to type control characters when required. Since Windows has only the "Control" key, there are potential conflicts in some cases, but these are minimized by the fact that Windows generally doesn't support UNIX conventions or utilities.

That means that although it is copyrighted, it is intended for you to use for education or entertainment. You may use it yourself, copy and redistribute it, or even put it on your own website. I ask only that you not make any changes. If you reuse any of the code, make sure to list me as one of your sources.

My only reward for writing this is the 15 milliseconds of fame I receive from having my name here. Don't deprive me of that.

You can copy this page by simply doing a "Save As" in your browser and putting it somewhere on your hard drive (or your web site). If you stop there the background will be gone. To preserve the background, copy the following file into this same folder, without changing its name, by again using your browser's "Save As". The next time you refresh the page, the background should be restored: