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JavaScript { Part 12 : Unicode }
It’s not that hard. but please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.
If you are the kind of developer who things that plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits, you are doing hopelessly wrong — Joel Spolsky’s
History
Was started by Xerox and Apple, for Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis. Was created in 1987 and published in October 1991, and the second volume in June 1992
This three co-founders of the Unicode project had the idea to create a universal set of character, this is because in that time were many incompatible standards for encoding plain text
The first proposal was published in 1998, this lead to expand the non-profit Unicode consortium, and was incorporated in 1991 also devoted to developing, maintaining and promoting software internationalization standards and data
Concepts
Characters
Is the smallest component of written language that has semantic value, developers know this as digital entities.
Graphemes
Is a single unit of writing, often from alphabetic writing systems. (alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, punctuation marks, etc), developers know this as atomic units.
— Users think in Graphemes and Developers think in characters
An example of graphemes could be in Spanish the ‘ch’ is considered as a single unit, so it’s a grapheme in Spanish.
Glyph
This is a concrete way of displaying a grapheme. Sometimes the same grapheme is displayed differently, depending on its context or other factors. For example of character/glyph differences: there is only one character T, but Times Bold and Verdana Italic each have a unique glyph for the character T.
In other words, a glyph is a particular visual representation of a character, in some of the cases this could represent more than one character
Code points
Unicode represents the characters it supports via numbers called code points. The hexadecimal range of code points is 0x0 to 0x10FFFF (17 times 16 bits)
