Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by keithgabryelski 3391 days ago
it's a practical guide, not comprehensive -- for most people this is a great start, especially if they are familiar with ASCII

you'll notice I didn't cover collation -- why? because explaining that would dilute process of understand UTF-x and UNICODE

1 comments

It's pedagogically wrong and extremely misleading.

When people start with introduction like this, they end up thinking they have learned more than they actually have.

I point this out because I was one of those mislead by several previous articles explaining Unicode encoding the same wrong way as you did. When I ran into trouble and asked help, everybody around me was misguided the same way. I didn't know I had to dig into manuals because everybody explained that this is how it is. Then I had to teach everyone else that we had all learned it wrong.

Many people deal only with ascii or other easy western alphabets and they can work years with Unicode before they hit into trouble.