Leaving The 8-bit World
We still kinda live in an 8-bit world. Our computer systems grew from simple terminals which could only show a limited set of characters. These typically supported ASCII characters and only eight bits long and focused on a US viewpoint of the world (‘a’-’z’,”A’-’Z’, ‘$’ and so on). In ASCII, an ‘a’ is 0x61 in hexadecimal, and 0110 0001 in binary.
But there’s a whole world of characters out there, and UTF-8 and UTF-16 open up a new world of character sets. For this, we can use Unicode, which allows us to support different character sets. Some examples are [here]:
Thus, a hex value which defines the code. For example, U+2800 to U+28FF give us Braille patterns [here]:
We can list some of the Unicode characters here:
To support this in a Web page, we need to add UTF-8 support:
<head>
<meta…
