A group of 8-bit glyphs. For example, the ISO-8859-1 (a.k.a. Latin-1) contain the regular latin chars for west european languages, ISO-8859-8 contain the hebrew chars, ISO-8859-5 have the cyrillic chars, etc. The concept is now obsolete due the advent of Unicode. Linux' base C library (libc) contain the technology to convert text from one charset to another and to/from Unicode.

This attribute specifies the character encoding of the resource to which the link points.

An encoding with a uniform, state-independent mapping from character to code points. Usually (but not necessarily), the code points are related to adequate presentation glyphs, that when presented use associated fonts.

A charset describes the keyspace of a job, e.g. what keys are part of the keyspace and what not. The charset is also responsible for mapping between the keys in the keyspace and a consequtive numberspace that goes from 1 to the number of the last key.