The Character Level and Above

In representation of texts, characters form but one protocol level, above which there are higher levels such as markup level, record structure level, and application level. Guidelines will be given about the coding of information at different levels when there is choice, such as using markup versus character difference (largely still an open problem despite the efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium and the Unicode Consortium). This is particularly important to processing of legacy data and to avoiding too fine distinctions at character level. The chapter ends with a section on media types for text and the difference between plain text, other subtypes of text, and application types such as text processing formats.