[thelist] carnfounded Character Encodings

Paul Cowan evolt at funkwit.com
Mon Oct 27 22:15:34 CST 2003


Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:
> Ok, all I want to do is understand Character Encodings once and for
> all. I went here
>
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/index.html
>
> and read the tutorial. My brain exploded, it wasn't pretty. Now I
> have some various understandings about "character repertoire" vs.
> "character code" and stuff like that. Fooey.

I don't claim to be an expert, but perhaps if you want a non-exploding
head, Joel Spolsky of "Joel On Software" fame has written a pretty
good basic explanation of character sets. It may or may not help you; it's
not really HTML-specific, but it does give a pretty good summary of why
things are the way they are. Give it a read!

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

Cheers,

Paul


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