Chapter 2
Characters and Terminology in Computing
In hindsight, what we have done is invented a computer communications Tower of Babel.
—Edwin Hart
Bits and Bytes
A Brief History of Character Encoding Standards
ASCII
ISO 8859
Other 8-Bit Encoding Schemes
Multi-octet Encoding Schemes
Problems with Encodings
Unicode
Transcoding
Chapter Summary
Bits and Bytes
In the context of computing, the terms character set, code page, and encoding are often used interchangeably or as synonyms. This is not quite correct. We need to find a better definition of all these pieces and see how they fit together.
So, how do we relate abstract characters to the bits ...
