Unicode is thoroughly underrated.
UTF-8, doubly so. One of the amazing/clever things they did was to build off of ASCII as a subset by taking advantage of the extra bit to stay backwards compatible, which is a lesson we should all learn when evolving systems with users (your chances of success are much better if you extend than to rewrite).
On the other hand, having dealt with UTF-7 (a very “special” email encoding), it takes a certain kind of nerd to really appreciate the nuances of encodings.
Unrelated, but what do you think (if anything) might end up being used by the last remaining reserved bit in IP packet header flags?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_version_4#Header
Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/
And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/
Oh no, we've been hacked! Theres chinese character in the event log! Or was it just unicode?
The entire video is worth watching, the history of "Plain text" from the beginning of computing.
The mouse pointer background is kinda a dick move. Good article. but the background is annoying for tired old eyes - which I assume are a target demographic for that article.
Was actually a great read. I didn't realize there were so many ways to encode the same character. TIL.
currency symbols other than the $ (kind of tells you who invented computers, doesn’t it?)
Who wants to tell the author that not everything was invented in the US? (And computers certainly weren't)
Because strings are such a huge problem nowadays, every single software developer needs to know the internals of them. I can't even stress it enough, strings are such a burden nowadays that if you don't know how to encode and decode one, you're beyond fucked. It'll make programming so difficult - no even worse, nigh impossible! Only those who know about unicode will be able to write any meaningful code.
I do understant why old unicode versions re-used “i” and “I” for turkish lowercase dotted i and turkish uppercase dotless I, but I don't understand why more recent version have not introduce two new characters that looks exactly the same but who don't require locale-dependant knowlege to do something as basic as “to lowercase”.
Probably for the same reason Spanish used to consider ch, ll, and rr as a single character.
If you go to the page without the trailing slash, the images don't load
