What is T.61 (Was: Chinese Character)

[Villy Kruse <vek@pharmapartners.nl>]

On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, John Kristian wrote:

> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 13:44:45 -0800
> From: John Kristian <kristian@netscape.com>
> To: Xuan Huan <huanx@moon.bjnet.edu.cn>
> Cc: openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org
> Subject: Re: Chinese Character
> 
> OpenLDAP does not support Chinese characters.  OpenLDAP uses T.61 (the
> character set specified by LDAP v2).  T.61 supports Western European
> languages, but not Chinese.
> 
> At least, that's my understanding.  I might be mistaken.
> 


It is my uderstanding that T.61 was a very old 8 bit extension to the
ASCII character set.  As such it is different from any of the iso-8859
character sets.

It was supposed to be used for the next generation of telex machines as
defined by the then CCITT, but the fax machines that later started to
become affordable basicaly killed these.

I have long wondered what T.61 was as you see references to it in the
open-ldap documentation, but nothing about what it is, let alone what
the encoding is.

Guess when we convert to UTF8 (8 bit encoding of unicode) we can forget
about T.61.


Villy