From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Fri Jan 25 2008 - 02:39:47 CST
Doug Ewell wrote:
> Marion Gunn <mgunn at egt dot ie> replied to Jukka Korpela:
>
>>> I would strongly recommend against using the phrase "character set"
>>> at all,
>>
>> I'd warmly welcome your advice as to which term you currently
>> recommend instead of 'character set', Jukka.
>
> I'm neither Jukka nor a member of the UTC, but my advice would be to
> go with "coded character set" and be done with it.
"Coded character set" might be suitable in some contexts for denoting
some of the intended meanings of "character set".
The point is that "character set" means different things to different
people. It could mean a repertoire of characters, a collection within a
repertoire, a mapping of characters to code numbers (i.e., "coded
character set", but this term is probably just mumbo-jumbo to people who
haven't seen a definition or an explanation for it), or a character
encoding. Specifically, the "charset" parameter of Internet message
headers, often needed in many contexts, looks like an abbreviation of
"character set", and it specifically denotes an encoding of characters
(via code numbers) to sequences of bytes (octets). And I'm pretty sure
there are other ways to (mis)understand "character set", too.
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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