Simon Willison’s Weblog

Fun with Unicode

13th September 2002

Hixie has submerged himself in Unicode. Stuart muses that the reason Unicode is so (potentially) huge is a legacy of the Y2K problem. I prefer the explanation given in XML in a Nutshell (my current reading matter of choice for three-and-a-half-hour-train-journeys-from-hell):

Unicode can potentially hold more than a million characters, but no one is willing to say in public where they think most of the remaining million characters will come from. *

* Footnote: Privately, some developers are willing to admit that they’re preparing for the day when we’re part of a Galactic Federation of thousands of intelligent species