http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html

"This document tries to clarify the concepts of character repertoire,
character code, and character encoding especially in the Internet context.
It specifically avoids the term character set, which is confusingly used to
denote repertoire or code or encoding. ASCII, ISO 646, ISO 8859 (ISO Latin,
especially ISO Latin 1), Windows character set, ISO 10646, UCS, and
Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-7, MIME, and QP are used as examples. This document in
itself does not contain solutions to practical problems with character
codes (but see section Further reading). Rather, it gives background
information needed for understanding what solutions there might be, what
the different solutions do - and what's really the problem in the first
place."

Good read for anybody using more than (7-bit) ASCII -- and maybe even then
:)  Goes a bit beyond the simple "character vs. bitsequence" view.

Gerhard

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