Re: [xml-dev] RE: Encoding charset of HTTP Basic Authentication

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

 >The distinction between bytes and characters is a fairly recent 
development. When I bought my first computer in the 1990s it came with 
Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22, and the german versions of those use 
different "code pages"...


In the Computer Science Tripos at Cambridge University they always used 
to ask a few open-ended questions, and I remember one from the early 
1970s along the lines "Why is character encoding such a difficult thing 
to get right?" Forty years on, getting it right hasn't become any easier.

However, I think any student answering that question would have been 
expected to understand the difference between characters and the bytes 
used to represent them.

Michael Kay
Saxonica