CHAPTER 41. CH38 CODECS: CODING AND DECODING 312
they seek a patent. After a patent is granted, those that use the intellectual
property must pay a royalty (money) to its owner.
Coding schemes can be considered Intellectual Property. The inventor may
believe his or her scheme is awesome and may seek to patent it.
Patents can prevent standardization as people try to find ways to avoid
paying royalties. This can result in more coding schemes.
41.3 MIME Types
MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME type
originated as a way to send email attachments. It did its job very well. As
a result, it has grown far beyond its original role, and has been adopted as
the way for identifying the coding method for all kinds of content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mime_typehas more.
There are standard MIME types for text, image, audio, video, and many
more things.
MIME types show up in webpages ascontent-typedeclarations.
But before you can even specify a MIME type, you have to settle on the
text encoding with which you will specify the MIME type.
41.4 Encoding Text (Characters)
The standard approach to encoding text is to encode the characters one by
one, giving each its own binary string.
The good news is that increasingly the problem of encoding text seems to
be solved. The world seems to have reached an agreement.
The “world” has largely agreed on a “Universal Character Set” (UCS).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Character_Sethas more.
The web has largely agreed on UTF-8.
UTF-8stands for UCS Transformation Format, 8 bit. It is the currently
accepted standard.