Masataka Ohta writes:
It was never spelled out in the minutes or anything like that, but
went something like:
From the minutes of November 91 meeting in Santa Fe:
(d) Character set issues
The Working Group specified the definition of a character set
for the purposes of quad-x to be a unique mapping of a byte
stream to glyphs, a mapping which does not require external
profiling information.
It seems to me that IETF correctly recognizes character set issues.
I believe the minutes are not fully correct wrt. character set
terminology here.
The term "glyph" has a distinct meaning in ISO terminology,
and it is very different form the ISO term "character".
The glyphs are representing the outlook while the character is
representing the meaning. For example the character "a" (LATIN
SMALL LETTER A) may be presented by a number of glyphs:
courier a, Times a, etc, and there is a distinctive difference between
the outlook of the italic Times "a" and the normal Times "a"
the first being round shaped like "o," and the latter
having a small round belly below and a horizontal line about
in the middle. They are glyphs of the same character, though.
There is another definition of "charset" found in RFC1345:
The ISO definition of the term "coded character set" is as follows:
"A set of unambiguous rules that establishes a character set and the
one-to-one relationship between the characters of the set and their
coded representation." and this definition may be subject to
different interpretations. This memo does not put further
restrictions on the term of "coded character set" than the following:
"A coded character set is a set of rules that unambiguously and
completely determines which sequence of characters, if any, is
represented by each possible sequence of n-bit bytes for a certain
value of n." This implies that e.g. a coded character set extended
with one or more other coded character sets by means of the extension
techniques of ISO 2022 constitutes a coded character set in its own
right. In this memo the term "charset" is used to refer to the above
interpretation of the ISO term "coded character set".
Keld