Unicode Explained

Extension for the basic set.” The letters GB are short for “Guojia Biaozhun,” which is

a transcription of the Chinese words for “National Standard.” Support for GB 18030

is mandatory for all computer operating systems sold in the People’s Republic of China.

The MIME name of the encoding has no space: “GB18030.”

There is a more detailed description of GB 18030 and its background available at http://

examples.oreilly.com/cjkvinfo/pdf/GB18030_Summary.pdf.

Punycode, Encoding for Domain Names

Punycode is an encoding, or an escape scheme (depending on how you look at it), for

a specific purpose: implementing Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). The idea

is that people can use Unicode characters in Internet domain names through special

conventions that map strings to ASCII strings. Software that supports IDN is expected

to recognize certain types of constructs in domain names as indicating that they should

not be interpreted as such but by the special conventions.

Suppose, for example, that we would like to register the Internet domain name “här-

mä.fi,” reflecting the Finnish name “Härmä.” Previously, such issues were resolved

simply by dropping the diacritic marks (e.g., “harma.fi”) or by using some replacement

notation (e.g., writing “muenchen” instead of “München”). This is rather unsatisfac-

tory, if the diacritics really make a difference in a language. For languages that use a

non-Latin script, ...