Target Audience: Manager, Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, Marketer

Level of Session: Intermediate

This tutorial will cover in detail the numerous legacy character sets and encodings, including several character sets that do not yet have complete Unicode coverage (such as CNS 11643-1992, Hong Kong GCCS, and JIS X 0213:1999), and which cannot yet be truly considered "legacy" by any stretch of the imagination. It is likely that some or all of these standards will have more complete or full coverage in future versions of Unicode, which will be one of the topics of discussion. Legacy character sets, which currently have full coverage in Unicode, include ASCII, ISO 8859-1:1998, GB 2312-80, Big Five, JIS X 0208:1997, JIS X 0212-1990, KS X 1001:1992, KS X 1002:1991, TCVN 6056:1995, and many others. The importance of distinguishing between character set and encoding will be strongly reinforced throughout the tutorial, particularly because understanding the difference is critical for software developers who deal with multiple character sets and encodings. Known errors in character sets along with various extensions thereof will be detailed during the tutorial. Attendees can expect to leave with a much better understanding of character sets and encodings, and more importantly how they relate to Unicode.