Larry Masinter writes:
And the other encodings haven't transformed character sets but
have just caused some terminology changes in order to make
distinctions that didn't exist before.
How about:
NOTE: The term "character set" as used originally in MIME arose
with the use of US-ASCII and other 7bit and 8bit specifications
which employ a simple mapping from single octets to single
characters. The advent of multi-octet coded character sets and
switching techniques has made the situation more complex. For
example, some communities have adopted the term "character encoding"
for what MIME calls a "character set", while using the phrase "coded
character set" to denote an abstract mapping from integers (not
octets) to characters.
At the time of specifying the first RFCs of MIME, we were fully
aware that taking a simplistic 7bit or 8bit view was not
adequate and that we needed support for multi-octet schemes.
These were under development as RFC1342 etc were published.
keld