Subject: re: Accepted characters

From: "Russ Atkind" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 17:19:20 -0500

First of all, thanks for the answer -- it was really helpful.  One thing I
still don't understand, though:

--On Thursday, March 26, 1998, 12:43 PM -0800 "Mark Crispin"
<[email-masked]> wrote: 

> FYI, a "character set" is a mapping from codepoints to characters.  A
charset
> is a encoding of text in one or more character sets.  This ranges from the
> null encoding (e.g. ISO-8859-1) to very complex encodings (ISO-2022-CN).
> There are many more charsets than there are character sets.
> 

I don't quite know enough to fully understand this answer.  (What are
codepoints? What does it mean to be a null encoding?)  Is there anywhere you
(or anyone) could point me to make myself a generally more educated person
regarding character sets and charsets?

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 14:25:06 -0800 (PST)

> regarding character sets and charsets?

RFC 2130 is a good place to start, as are the References and Recommended
Reading List in the appendix of RFC 2130.

I'd be happy to answer questions (I helped write RFC 2130), but in general I
think that it would be better for you to get your information directly from
the document and avoid accidental misstatements due to paraphrasing.

I also recommend getting a copy of "The Unicode Standard: Version 2.0",
available at any good technical book store.  It's an essential reference if
you're going to be dealing with character sets in general and Unicode in
particular.