title: What is the exact difference between Windows-1252(1/3/4) and ISO-8859-1?
body: <p>We are hosting PHP apps on a Debian based LAMP installation.
  Everything is quite ok - performance, administrative and management wise.
  However being a somewhat new devs (we're still in high-school) we've run into some problems with the character encoding for Western Charsets.</p>
  
  <p>After doing a lot of researches I have come to the conclusion that the information online is somewhat confusing. It's talking about Windows-1252 being ANSI and totally ISO-8859-1 compatible. </p>
  
  <p>So anyway, What is the difference between Windows-1252(1/3/4) and ISO-8859-1?
  And where does ANSI come into this anyway?</p>
  
  <p>What encoding should we use on our Debian servers (and workstations) in order to ensure that clients get all information in the intended way and that we don't lose any chars on the way?</p>