i.justrealized

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Want a game of chess?

More and more pages in unicode. Remember those times where you open a web page full of question marks? This just shouldn’t happen. Hopefully everyone moves to unicode soon. Lots of Chinese websites are still not on unicode actually.

Moving to Unicode 5.1

Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another. What’s more impressive than simply overtaking them is the speed with which this happened; take a look at the blue line in this graph. (Source: Google blog)

Unicode growth chart from Google blog.

I’ve been reading about character encoding recently, in particular to the various unicode standards. I’ve been rather pissed off with setting up the wrong collation in MySQL, I just realized that at my other blog, I have posts that are in utf8_unicode_ci, latin1_general_ci and utf_general_ci. This is what you get when you migrate database blindly without knowing what is character set. I regret not reading enough. Now I set everything to utf8_general_ci.

Anyway, something about another encoding set - GB2312 - caught my attention.

Here’s a trivia, the older Chinese encoding GB2312 cannot write the former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji’s name. His name has often appeared as 朱熔基. Zhu disapproves of this and prefers the correct version, 朱镕基. (more…)