What Is Unicode?
The world's written languages come in many scripts and styles. There are the calligraphic strokes of the Japanese and Chinese languages, the distinctive script of Hebrew, the flowing letters of Arabic, and many, many other styles with unique flourishes. Traditionally, ASCII text, consisting of 256 different characters, was the only encoding we had to represent all of these languages on the Web. Naturally, this limited character set could represent only Western European languages with any facility. Then along came Unicode, a 16-bit encoding standard that encompasses most of the written languages in the world, as well as publishing, mathematical, and technical symbols and punctuation marks. Unicode provides a unique number for ...
Get SVG for Web Developers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
