Unicode Deep Dive

A 10-part series covering every foundational concept of the Unicode Standard, from code points and planes to encodings, normalization, and the consortium that maintains it.

1. 1

   What Is Unicode? The Universal Character Standard Explained

   Learn what Unicode is, why it was created, and how it assigns a unique code point to every character in every writing system.

2. 2

   Unicode Planes and Blocks: How 1.1 Million Code Points Are Organized

   Understand Unicode's 17 planes and hundreds of blocks — from the Basic Multilingual Plane to supplementary planes for emoji and historic scripts.

3. 3

   Unicode Encodings Explained: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 Compared

   Compare UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 encodings — how they work, when to use each, and why UTF-8 dominates the web.

4. 4

   Unicode Normalization: NFC, NFD, NFKC, and NFKD Explained

   Master Unicode normalization forms — when to use NFC vs NFD, canonical vs compatibility equivalence, and how normalization prevents bugs.

5. 5

   Unicode Properties and Categories: Classifying Every Character

   Explore Unicode General Categories, Script property, and other character properties used in regex, text processing, and internationalization.

6. 6

   Bidirectional Text in Unicode: How RTL and LTR Scripts Coexist

   Understand Unicode's Bidirectional Algorithm — how Arabic, Hebrew, and other RTL scripts mix with LTR text in web pages and applications.

7. 7

   How Emoji Work in Unicode: From Code Points to Skin Tones

   Discover how emoji are encoded in Unicode — ZWJ sequences, skin tone modifiers, variation selectors, and the emoji submission process.

8. 8

   CJK Unification: How Unicode Handles Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

   Learn about Han Unification in Unicode — how shared CJK ideographs are unified, the controversy it creates, and how language tags affect rendering.

9. 9

   Unicode Version History: From 1.0 to 16.0 and Beyond

   A complete history of Unicode versions — major milestones, character count growth, emoji additions, and the stability policy that keeps it all working.

10. 10

    Unicode CLDR: The Database Behind Every Localized App

    Explore the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository — how CLDR powers number formatting, date patterns, collation, and pluralization worldwide.