text length in bytes or chars?

[KimSeong Loh]

According to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/storage-requirements.html
It seems to say that TEXT is counted as characters instead of bytes, does TEXT allows 65535 bytes or 65535 characters?
There is also this example on the page
For example, L+1 bytes to store a TINYTEXT value before MySQL 4.1 becomes L characters + 1 byte to store the length as of MySQL 4.1.

I vaguely recall that TEXT is still counted in bytes and not characters.