An Overview of Unicode

Even though there’s a lot of complexity under the hood of Unicode the truth of the matter is this is one of the more elegant solutions in the world of programming to provide a unique number and “identifier” for every single character a computer may have to redo or analyze – regardless of the platform that computer is based on, the program that is running, or the individual language that is being input into the machine.

This is a game changing development that transformed the world of programming when it was established, helping to create a universal standard (partly why it’s called Unicode to begin with) that streamlined things significantly even though it can be a little bit complex to wrap your head around at first when you are just getting started.

Below you’ll find our accessible overview of Unicode to better understand exactly what you are getting into when you start to utilize this programming standard, an encoding that isn’t technically an encoding – something we will dive a little deeper into below.

How characters worked before Unicode

When you boil everything down, computers really only ever deal with numbers – zeros and ones – and aren’t really understanding or interpreting the individual characters that you are punching in on your keyboard or are having displayed on your screen.

Before the Unicode system was developed there were a variety of different encoding systems out there, each and every single one of them that assigned numbers to individual characters in a unique form and fashion.

A lot of these character encodings simply didn’t mesh up with one another, weren’t capable of covering all characters for every language on the planet, and weren’t even able to handle all characters and symbols in a specific language (like English) without basically melting down.

One of the biggest challenges in the world of computer programming before Unicode was the fact that these character encodings simply didn’t line up with one another. If two separate encodings were using the same number for two totally different characters altogether, or using different numbers for the same character, the end result was a catastrophe.

On top of that, a certain computer may have been designed to take advantage of a variety of different encodings that were completely different than the range of encodings that a different computer or operating system was able to understand.

Anytime data was passed or transmitted between these two computers there was always the potential for encodings to conflict, a situation that inevitably caused a whole host of data corruption issues, serious errors, and really slowed down the collaborative nature of data sharing to begin with.

Worse, there were some languages out there deemed “too small” to even have their characters encoded to begin with. Japanese and its pictograph based language, for example, had to be translated into a different language before it could be encoded in the early days.

Unicode comes along and changes everything

Early computer programmers fought with all of these different character encodings for quite a while (honestly a lot longer than you probably would have expected) but there came a time when a global standard was recognized as being absolutely essential.

This was the birth of Unicode.

Engineered to be a global standard that was capable of supporting each individual character in every world language, including languages that had not yet been encoded and hadn’t even been understood or “invented” at that point in time, Unicode was built to be expandable and about as future proof as humanly possible.

In fact, languages that computer professionals never thought would be encoded have been added to Unicode over the last few years, languages that include Cherokee, Mongolian, and even ancient projection hieroglyphics, believe it or not.

Languages that have distinct dialects can be encoded through Unicode now as well, something that was very difficult to pull off successfully with traditional character encoding systems that did not support the Unicode standard.

The big benefits of a Unicode standard

There have obviously been a myriad of benefits that the Unicode standard has our shirt in, not the least of which is a step towards creating a truly universal language that computers can understand effortlessly – moving our technological revolution forward even faster than we would have been able to otherwise.

Unicode provides an easily digestible encoding language that allows software, websites, and other digital to be designed for a whole host of different platforms, languages, and nations around the world with a simple and straightforward approach that slashes costs and improves stability across the board.

On top of that, Unicode data can be shared and used across a variety of different systems without having to worry at all about data failure, data corruption, or unforeseen errors because of a specific coding scheme.

The ability to transmit and share data across a variety of different systems, all of which may be running different operating systems, different web browsers, different software versions and different native languages without any hiccups along the way is really one of the most impressive things Unicode makes possible.

Combine that with the fact that Unicode can act as a “translator” for a variety of other individual character encoding schemes – with those character encoding schemes being translated to Unicode first and then translated to another character encoder for full backwards compatibility – opens up a tremendous amount of power and potential that never existed before.

Unicode keeps evolving

At the end of the day, though, the most impressive thing about Unicode is that it was conceived of as something truly future proof and without limitations.

As we made mention of earlier, it’s possible for languages (including some long thought dead and gone forever) to be encoded in a way that could have been possible without a lot of brute force effort and manpower with traditional character encoding approaches.

On top of that, languages that are invented in the future can also be encoded with Unicode.

This is a global standard that will continue to be expanded on, continued to be developed, and continued to be useful no matter what kinds of changes we see in the computing world for the next decade, quarter-century, half-century, or more.

Never again are computers going to have a difficult time speaking to one another across barriers that humans continue to have to struggle with.

Data can be easily understood, interpreted, and shared across a variety of different systems because of this complete character flexibility that Unicode works with, allowing any letter, any number, and any symbol (past, future, and present) to be condensed down into a very specific number that a computer can recognize and interpret.

One of the most incredible things about the power of Unicode is that it is capable of all this while remaining totally in the background, something that end-users are never going to think about why they take advantage of major technological advances only ever made possible thanks to the flexibility, versatility, and stability that Unicode has ushered in.

Make no mistake about it, without this universal standard our world that depends so much on hyper connectivity across a variety of different devices, hardware options, and software solutions would look all whole lot different than it does today.