fnordperfectSep 13, 2025
OSNews

“UTF-8 is a brilliant design”

The first time I learned about UTF-8 encoding, I was fascinated by how well-thought and brilliantly it was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts, and still be backward compatible with ASCII.

[...]

Designing a system that scales to millions of characters and still be compatible with the old systems that use just 128 characters

https://www.osnews.com/story/143326/utf-8-is-a-brilliant-design/

#OSNews

“UTF-8 is a brilliant design” – OSnews

Sep 13, 2025 at 8:50pmWeb
Show threadgullevek ☢️ 🇯🇵Sep 13, 2025
@osnews They sadly forgot to put Chinese Korean Japanese and Vietnamese characters into their own code space. So you can never use the same font to have eg Chinese and Japanese in the same document
Show threadDougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)Sep 14, 2025

@gullevek @osnews
They didn't "forget". It was in fact very difficult, but it was a design choice that fit the overall goals of the Unicode Consortium despite being unpopular with most people.

It has nonetheless proven functional, and in fact to have been done in an expert, even inspired way. Few standards groups have experts who could expertly fuse C+J+K.

And fonts are very explicitly not a Unicode issue. As soon as you mention them, you have changed the subject.

Show threadgullevek ☢️ 🇯🇵Sep 14, 2025
@dougmerritt @osnews True. Let’s keep the fonts out of it and be happy we have a working encoding standard. Especially for Asian languages where there were way way way way way too many. It was horrible (and still is, looking at you windows excel)