Unicode
What is Unicode?
Unicode represents a global standard in character encoding, uniquely and universally defining characters from every language across the globe.
With Unicode, the language of the characters on a web page, whether Latin, Chinese, Arabic, or Russian, becomes irrelevant. It ensures consistent display across various platforms and devices, irrespective of their origin.
The Genesis of Unicode
Prior to Unicode, each language had its bespoke character encoding system. This fragmentation posed significant challenges in text display and data exchange across different digital platforms.
For instance, Japanese and Chinese scripts, which comprise characters not found in traditional Latin character sets like ASCII or ISO-8859, were particularly problematic.
In 1991, the Unicode Consortium—an assembly of experts in computer science and linguistics—introduced Unicode to address these complexities.
Note. The Unicode Consortium is an international organization committed to developing a universal character encoding standard.
Their vision was a unified encoding system that would be universally applicable.
Understanding Unicode's Functionality
Unicode assigns a unique numerical code to each character, enabling computers to recognize and display text accurately, regardless of the language or device used.
Consider this practical example: The uppercase letter "A" is represented as U+0041 in Unicode, while the Chinese character "δΈ€" is denoted as U+4E00.
These numeric representations allow any computer to accurately display a wide array of characters.
Example. A Chinese user sends an email in their native script to an American user. With Unicode, the American recipient can view the email's original content without needing to install additional character sets. This universality extends to multilingual software as well, enabling seamless operation across different operating systems and languages.
Comparing Unicode with ASCII
While both Unicode and ASCII are character encoding standards, they serve different purposes and have distinct capacities.
- ASCII
Developed in the 1960s, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was designed to represent the English alphabet and common computer symbols using 7 bits. This limited it to a maximum of 128 characters, catering primarily to Western languages. - UNICODE
Conceived in the 1990s, Unicode transcended ASCII's limitations, accommodating a diverse range of characters used in languages worldwide. It employs 8 to 32 bits per character, enabling the representation of over a million different characters, including a wide variety of symbols and emojis. The 16-bit version is the most prevalent, encoding around 60,000 characters.
Note. Unicode's initial characters align with ASCII, ensuring backward compatibility with ASCII-based systems.
Unicode has continuously evolved, incorporating new fonts and character sets to support an ever-growing range of languages and scripts.
Today, Unicode is the cornerstone of digital document creation and multilingual software development, making the exchange of digital information far more straightforward than in the past.
