Note

Date: Jan. 14, 2000
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/charcol/
Source Author or Organization: W3C

This note proposes a common notation syntax used for operations on characters and strings that often depend on character types, character classes, or character properties.

Here is an explanation of "character collections" from the specification itself:

"A character collection is a set of characters. Once a notation for character collections is defined and agreed upon, collections can be easily defined and referenced via web addresses (URIs) [URI], can be enumerated, and can be constructed from other collections using set operators."

"By making character collections available via an URI, they become first-class web objects. The URI of a collection serves both as an identifier (or name) of the collection as well as a way to obtain the description of the collection if necessary. There is no need to define names for collections separately from the URI."