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NDLP Glossary - A

API

Application Programming (or Programmer) Interface.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange, pronounced 'as-kee'. A standard coding scheme which uses the numbers 0 to 127 (7 bits) to represent the alphabet, digits, and a few symbols. Originally developed for telecommunications, ASCII is the character set used by personal computers, UNIX, for most electronic mail, and on the World Wide Web (in fact for almost all computer systems other than IBM mainframes, which use the EBCDIC coding scheme).

Most computers use 8 bits (1 byte) per character. By using 8 bits, the character set can be enlarged, for instance, to include letters with diacritics and a wider range of symbols. However, these extensions to ASCII are not standard across computer types or around the world -- they are in fact used in different countries to provide support for the special characters and punctuation needed for the local language(s).

You may have noticed occasional strange characters in e-mail messages or WWW pages. It may be because the author (or her word processor) used non-ASCII characters, often an accent or left and right quotation marks. The character set for HTML (version 2.0) is defined as part of the specification. Characters with codes less than 127 correspond to ASCII. Although the set includes non-ASCII characters (those with codes above 127), today's browsers may not recognize them properly. Follow this link to see how the HTML characters are handled by your browser -- be sure to read the rendering note.

HTML provides a mechanism for representing non-ASCII characters through its "character entities" feature. Unfortunately, not all browsers handle the defined character entities properly. Follow this link to see how the character entities are handled by your browser -- be sure to read the "rendering note".

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