Re: Unicode (was Re: HTML, ASCII, and Homesite)

["Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- JAEDWORKS -dot- COM>]

At 3:31 PM -0800 1/5/99, AlQuin wrote:
>On 04-01-1999 23:09 Mark Baker wrote:
>>At some time in the future we may or may not see Unicode widely adopted, in
>>which case a lot of these problems go away.
>
>Another HTML alternative? Can you generate some more information on
>Unicode?

Unicode is not a markup language like HTML, but an expanded "universal"
character set.

The ASCII character set uses 7 bits per character and can encode a total of
128 characters (the upper and lower-case alphabets, numbers, basic
punctuation, and control characters). Since ASCII lacks a lot of characters
people want to use (such as accented vowels), ASCII has been extended to 8
bits (256 characters) - there are several 256-character standards. Unicode
is a further, much broader extension, to 16 bits (65,536 characters) -
enough so that you can write most human languages in Unicode characters.
Unicode includes, among much else, the m-dash that started this thread a
few days ago.

There is some relationship between HTML and Unicode:  HTML 3.2, by default,
used ISO-Latin, the most widespread of the 256-character standards. HTML
4.0 uses Unicode. Since ISO-Latin is a subset of Unicode - the first 256
characters of Unicode are the same as the 256 characters in ISO-Latin -
there is backward compatibility from Unicode to the older standard.
Unfortunately, the browser makers are still working on forward
compatibility. ;-)

--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed -at- jaedworks -dot- com
http://www.jaedworks.com


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