Marcin WicharySep 15, 2024

I built this proof of concept of a tool called https://text.makeup. It is meant to be a friendly Unicode explainer – meant not just for Unicode nerds, but nerds of any kind. Useful for debugging, but also learning.

You can go there now to play (much more fun on desktop!), but I also recorded a 5-minute video that explains it further.

I am curious: Does this feel like fun? Is it worth building out for real? What would you like to see in it if so?

Text makeup

Show threadStefan IhringerSep 15, 2024
@mwichary Your page looks great and it's fun to play with. I tried a syntax that I've seen from time to time but that I never understood: the escaping of domain names with umlauts. And to my surprise, text.makeup knows about it, but it's not fully implemented it seems (no further details and the highlighting of characters and URL parts doesn't line up). Shall I add an issue on github?
Show threadMarcin WicharySep 15, 2024
@compfu Oh, I can tell from the screenshot that the JavaScript broke somewhere along the way – possibly it’s been processed properly by new URL() in JavaScript, but the tool itself is unaware. I completely forgot about this one and it’s a great bug report. No GitHub necessary!
Show threadMarcin WicharySep 15, 2024
@compfu I’m also curious to learn more about it now.
Show threadMarcin WicharySep 15, 2024
@compfu BTW which browser are you using? Weirdly enough it doesn’t do that for me.
Show threadStefan IhringerSep 15, 2024
@mwichary it's Vivaldi. As soon as I enter the "ü" this error shows up in the console:
Show threadMarcin WicharySep 15, 2024

@compfu Thanks! I figured out the original issue – turns out I wasn’t doing exactly the steps you were doing, and it’s not Vivaldi-specific after all.

It would be fun to support and explain Punycode, but it will a bit more work. But in the meantime I fixed the international domains from breaking at least, if you reload the tool. Gave you credit at https://text.makeup/about/ – thanks again!

About – Text makeup

Show threadMarcin Wichary
@compfu I added support to Punycode – thanks again for suggestin that. It was actually really hard because that encoding can be non-linear… it’s not bug-free, but it should work much better now: https://text.makeup/#example-punycode-in-domain-name
Text makeup

Mar 17, 2025 at 2:59amWeb
Show threadStefan IhringerMar 23, 2025
@mwichary wow, thanks for remembering my post from waaaay back :)