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Speaking JavaScript
book

Speaking JavaScript

by Axel Rauschmayer
February 2014
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
460 pages
8h 32m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Speaking JavaScript

Chapter 24. Unicode and JavaScript

This chapter is a brief introduction to Unicode and how it is handled in JavaScript.

Unicode History

Unicode was started in 1987, by Joe Becker (Xerox), Lee Collins (Apple), and Mark Davis (Apple). The idea was to create a universal character set, as there were many incompatible standards for encoding plain text at that time: numerous variations of 8-bit ASCII, Big Five (Traditional Chinese), GB 2312 (Simplified Chinese), and more. Before Unicode, no standard for multilingual plain text existed, but there were rich-text systems (such as Apple’s WorldScript) that allowed you to combine multiple encodings.

The first Unicode draft proposal was published in 1988. Work continued afterward and the working group expanded. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated on January 3, 1991:

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard [...]

The first volume of the Unicode 1.0 standard was published in October 1991, and the second in June 1992.

Important Unicode Concepts

The idea of a character may seem a simple one, but there are many aspects to it. That’s why Unicode is such a complex standard. The following are important basic concepts:

Characters and graphemes
These two terms mean something quite similar. Characters are digital entities, while graphemes are atomic units of written languages (alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449365028Errata