On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Deborah Goldsmith <email@hidden> wrote:
> That article is missing several concepts which are essential for
> understanding Unicode; like many programmers, Mr. Spolsky thinks of Unicode
> as "wide ASCII", which it is not. The article doesn't cover surrogate pairs
> (the fact that he uses the term UCS-2 instead of UTF-16 shows he's not up to
> date) or combining sequences (grapheme clusters). If you're going to go
> groveling through Unicode text, you need to understand both.
He uses UTF-16 as well. I don't think that he doesn't understand
surrogate pairs or otherwise treats Unicode as wide ASCII. In fact, I
think the main point of the article was to drive home the point that
the simple 1:1 mapping of glyphs to bytes that ASCII exhibits isn't
even a valid concept in the world of Unicode, and gave a primer on why
this is the case. Hence the "Absolute Minimum" part of the title.
> This article is a bit stuffy, but also more complete, and is even shorter (I
> think):
>
> http://unicode.org/standard/principles.html
>
> This is also good:
>
> http://icu-project.org/userguide/unicodeBasics.html
Of course these have the added benefit of being more likely correct,
since their authors work on Unicode or software implementations. :)
I didn't mean to tread on your toes here, I just find that Joel's
article is a very good way to quickly get programmers to understand
that Unicode is a very different beast, and that it really does
matter.
--Kyle Sluder
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