Learning Things

Yesterday, on a whim, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Unicode. I have seen the terms “UTF-8” and “UTF-16” and “Unicode” for years but I didn’t have much idea what all that meant.

This tweet emerged from my reading:

Seriously. Wow. Check out the article and see if you agree. I’ll wait.

It’s both humbling and exciting to realize how little you know about some things. Things that have been outside your realm of learning or experience. I read this statement from the article

Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs (see Han unification).

…and realized that if I could understand what those words mean when all put together, I’d have a much better understanding of a topic, because while all those words are English, I had no idea what that sentence means.

Learning is fun. Everybody should skim Wikipedia occasionally.

Comments

2 responses to “Learning Things”

  1. Marion Avatar

    Unicode makes my life easier. I wish more people used UTF-8 rather than ISO-8859-1. ISO encoding often makes me want to hurt things.

  2. Bill Ruhsam Avatar
    Bill Ruhsam

    See. All I know about that is that UTF-8 retroactively covers ISO-8859-1. Right?

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