Glossary

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ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange, often referred to as plain text. ASCII is a character encoding based on characters of the English language plus various non-printing device control codes. There are many variants. ASCII has been extended to accommodate a large number of human languages and for other purposes using, e.g., Unicode and ISO/IEC:10646-Universal Character Set. ASCII is the foundation of many markup languages, including all variants of XML. See generally An annotated history of some character codes or ASCII. ASCII was orginally developed as a telegraphy code, i.e., a communications protocol, but quickly became a "file format" as electromagnetic data storage media displaced punched paper tape. See also: communications protocol