Everything You Need To Know About XML And Character Encodings

I started my career at Wang Laboratories in the International Products group. We were, for the day, pretty far ahead of a lot of our competition in terms of support for localized versions of our products. Although I spent only two years in that department, for the remainder of my eight year tenure at Wang I continued to be the "international guy" in the departments that I worked in. In the days when computer vendors were just beginning to shift from 7 to 8 bit character sets, I developed the code for dealing with the problem of email messages moving between countries with different national character sets and handling localized collate sequences in our Wang OFFICE email product. Software internationalization (a.k.a. "i18n") has remained one of my areas of interest throughout my various jobs since leaving Wang thirteen years ago.

My most recent adventures in this area have been with XML and Unicode. I followed the development of the Unicode standard closely when I was still at Wang. I wasn't particularly happy with some of the design decisions that the standards committee made, but the standard has matured a lot since then. There are still things about it that I think could have been done in ways that would have allowed for more efficient coding, but the speed of today's computers make the point almost totally moot.

Anyhow, this has all just been a long introduction to bring me to the point of mentioning that, via Uche Ogbuji's blog on the O'Reilly site, I found my way to a really wonderful resource: an incredibly thorough tutorial on XML and character encoding.