EIA-232 Scope of the standard

The Electronics Industries Association (EIA) standard RS-232-C defines following elements:

1. Electrical signal characteristics such as voltage levels, signaling rate, timing and slew-rate of signals, voltage withstand level; short-circuit behavior, and maximum load capacitance.
   
2. Interface mechanical characteristics, pluggable connectors and pin identification.
   
3. Functions of each circuit in the interface connector.
   
4. Standard subsets of interface circuits for selected telecom applications.
   

However below mentioned elements are not defined by EIA-232 standard:

1. Character encoding like ASCII, Baudot code or EBCDIC
   
2. Framing of characters in the data stream, for example, bits per character, start/stop bits, parity
   
3. protocols for error detection or algorithms for data compression
   
4. Bit rates for transmission, although the standard says it is intended for bit rates lower than 20,000 bits per second. Many modern devices support speeds of 115,200 bit/s and above
   
5. Power supply to external devices.