Anyway, about encodings: the most useful thing I find to remember is that we can only exchange any information at all because we have a previous agreement about what things mean. This applies as much to this conversation and the language in which we are having it as it does to encodings, it’s just that encodings are rather more precise agreements.
So.
If I send you something, it’s just a stream of bytes. If I POST something to your form, it’s just a stream of