> I think you're basically forcing this concept onto national standards > which lack it. I don't think that most of the national standards > actually define the semantics of the characters they encode > (categorizations, case mapping, sort order), and although they assign > byte sequences to represent their characters, I'm not sure they > actually present this in terms of assigning integers to them, in the > sense of code points v. byte sequences.
Yeah. Let's take, say, ISO 8859-1: http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n411.pdf No "semantics", just an assignment of abstract characters to numbers and the respective bit patterns.
