8-bit characters -- what in the world are these?

[Markku Kolkka]

Benjamin Sher kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika sunnuntai, 3. 
heinäkuuta 2005 12:59):
> What, in plain English, is all of this 8-bit character stuff
> about?

8-bit characters are used to write in other languages than plain 
English :-) They are the characters that are missing from the 
US-ASCII 7-bit character set. "quoted printable MIME encoding" 
is a way to encode 8-bit characters into US-ASCII character set 
so that software stuck in the 1970's passes it through 
undamaged.

> A follow-up question: What is "8-bit characters" in opposition 
to? To 
> Unicode? If so, in what sense?

UTF-8 encoded Unicode contains 8-bit characters, so you get two 
layers of encoding: Unicode -> UTF-8 and UTF-8 -> MIME 
quoted-printable. 

-- 
 Markku Kolkka
 markku.kolkka at iki.fi