Bridgewebs was first used over 15 years ago when the normal was to use the ASCII (ISO-8859-1) Character set. This allowed the standard Latin characters to be used together with most accented characters used in Europe. Variations of this are available  for extended character sets such as Cyrillic which is IS-8859-5. The ASCII character sets all use 1 byte to represent a character, so that means up to 128 normal and punctuation characters and a further 128 Accented Characters, When Online web sites became more popular, a newer/different standard UTF-8 was introduced. The lower 128 characters are the same, but all accented characters are represented by 2 or more high order bytes.  Newer online sites are now predominately UTF-8 and they do not have to worry about extended character sets, this is all supported by the Browsers and the appropriate characters are held on the databases.

Bridgewebs does support a site in either ASCII or UTF-8 and this can be set upon careful consideration by Bridgewebs for any site. HOWEVER, a site can only be one or the other, these cannot be mixed. 

If an ASCII site tries to display UTF-8 characters, symbols such as Ä may appear

If a UTF-8 site tries to display ASCII characters, symbols such as � may appear

There are several features with Bridgewebs to help with supporting UTF-8 or ASCII

• There are 2 dictionaries, 1 in each character set
• Any Player names will be checked to the Membership database and matched ignoring any accented characters