• The first version of the codepage was used in Microsoft
Windows 1.0. It matched the ISO-8859-1 standard (including leaving code points 0xD7 and 0xF7 undefined, as they were not in the standard at that time). • The second version of the codepage was introduced in Microsoft
Windows 2.0. In this version, code points 0xD7, 0xF7, 0x91, and 0x92 are defined. • The third version of the codepage was introduced in Microsoft
Windows 3.1. It defined all code points used in the final version except the
euro sign and the
Z with caron character pair. • The final version (shown below) was introduced in Microsoft
Windows 98. Starting in the 1990s, many
Microsoft products that could produce HTML included Windows-1252-exclusive characters, but marked the
encoding as ISO-8859-1, ASCII, or undeclared. Characters exclusive to Windows-1252 would render incorrectly on non-Windows operating systems (often as question marks). In particular, typographers' quotes—curly variants of the standard straight
apostrophes and
quotation marks in US-ASCII—were commonly used in files produced in Windows applications such as
Microsoft Word due to the
smart quotes feature, which can automatically convert straight apostrophes and quotation marks to the curly variants. To fix this, by 2000 most web browsers and e-mail clients treated the charsets ISO-8859-1 and US-ASCII as Windows-1252—this behavior is now required by the HTML5 specification. Undeclared charsets in HTML are also assumed to be Windows-1252. Although
Windows NT supported
Unicode and attempted to encourage programs to use it, it only provided the 16-bit code units of
UCS-2/
UTF-16, despite the existing support for other multibyte character encodings such as
Shift-JIS. As many applications preferred to use 8-bit strings, Windows-1252 remained the most popular encoding on Windows.
UTF-8 has been supported since
Windows 10 so this is gradually changing. == Code page layout ==