Profiles in Unicode

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The New York Times has a great profile of Michael Everson, one of the many architects of Unicode. I hope some day there are more profiles like this about the many people devoting great chunks of their lives to the Unicode cause, people like Mark Davis, Asmus Freytag, and John Jenkins (to name just a few).

The article did a good job of describing Unicode — something I find extremely hard to describe:

A more technical explanation of Unicode is this: When Mr. Everson sends e-mail in ogham, his computer isn’t sending ogham letters through the ether. Instead, strings of 0’s and 1’s are transmitted, and when they arrive on a friend’s computer, they generate on its screen the same ogham letters that Mr. Everson typed. Unicode is the master list that resides in both computers and translates individual letters and symbols into strings of 0’s and 1’s and back again. Most current software is Unicode-compliant, which means that this master list of all the world’s writing systems has been built into operating systems, browsers and software.

Even though Unicode includes more than 50 different writing systems. it is far complete. I was surprised to learn that there are nearly 100 more writing systems left to be included, which means that we will likely not be around to see Unicode completed. I guess it’s kinda like Boston’s Big Dig.

Want to learn more about Unicode? Visit the Web site.

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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