Talk:Text encoding

Rewrite

I thought this article was generally wrong, so rewritten. Previous text preserved in a comment. Tim Bray 06:25, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I find it odd that there is no reference to the character encoding article. I'll add that in a "See also" section, but I think there is probably significant overlap between this article and that one, and I think we should try to work on figuring out a way to disambiguate or merge them. Is there a difference between "text encoding" and "character encoding"? Would, say, Morse Code be under one and not the other? — mjb 01:26, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

ASCII?

Is ASCII really by far the most common encoding ? Is it so much more common than ISO-8859-1/15 ?

Merged with character encoding

Upon closer inspection, there was nothing in this article to differentiate "text encoding" from "character encoding", and all of the content is, I believe, covered elsewhere, so this article now redirects to the character encoding article. I merged the intro paragraphs but did not see anything else in this article that was necessary to reproduce in the other.

I think someone once wanted "text encoding" to be a separate article because "character encoding" was being used to specifically apply to low-level character encodings in computers, and thus excluded more general character encodings used in non-computer-based communication, like Morse Code and ASCII, as well as higher-level encodings such as Vietnamese Quoted-Readable. However, the character encoding article now covers the former examples, and the latter, if they ever were in the article, aren't anymore, so this article is (was) redundant. Perhaps there should be a term for the higher-level encodings, but "text encoding" certainly isn't ideal. — mjb 04:05, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)