Why I can type ±©♥🔥🂱Ʊ in this title

Decoding unicode.

More info and sources at bottom.
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Where I get my music (Free trial affiliate link):

My camera, as of February 2022 (affiliate link):

This actually ended up my favorite website to surf random Unicode on:

1991 article about Unicode:

John Cook post I remade the chart from:

Nice for comparing Emoji renderings:

Google's chart of Unicode Adoption:

More technical history that got me started (along with lots of YT videos):

Unicode V1 - in general, their site has a lot of documents you can look through.

Unicode 88:

Page all about Noto:

Didn't run into a ton of Academic papers (or didn't look), so Unicode ended up being the most useful starting place.

[EternalGoldenBraid]

Your take on the typical YouTube video is depressingly accurate

[OmegaGlops]

Has Unicode added a character for the "Cool S" yet? I feel like that's a crucial piece of historical iconography that definitely needs to be included!

[tehbertl]

One of my favorite parts of Unicode and emoji is that there's a sort of "glue" character that can be used to alter or modify an already existing emoji. It allows people to specify a skin color for emojis of people, and the pride flag is basically "basic flag emoji + glue + rainbow". It's just such a neat trick that the Unicode people used to greatly increase the range of emoji that can be supported.

[robinmichel]

When I worked at a national wildlife refuge, we made maps in ArcGIS to hand out to people who wanted to bird watch. We'd mark spots where you could see cranes, eagles, ducks, etc. ArcGIS doesn't easily allow for images to be imported into a map, so we used a bird font. I forget exactly what letter corresponded to what bird but it made labelling bird watching locations super easy. 😂

[jsonlee]

As a developer I’m familiar with ASCII and Unicode but this was still very informative and entertaining video. Keep up the good work and Thanks!

[MrNicePotato]

I am a Chinese speaker and I am learning Japanese. I know the hiragana and katagana pretty well but sometimes I don't know the pronunciation of a kanji. I would just switch to Chinese and type the Chinese equivalent and I am always surprised how it knows it is supposed to be a Japanese kanji not a Chinese character. Turns out someone (probably a group of people) painstakingly found out every single Japanese kanji that is exactly the same as their Chinese counterpart and made them the same unicode!

[farphos]

Repeatedly hearing the letter "Ä" being called "A" gave my swedish ass an aneurysm, even though i know he's not wrong and that the point being made is that you can add diacritics like an umlaut/diaeresis to letters using unicode.

[vKevlar]

That Ron/Don/ducks bit was absolute gold. Great job with this and all your videos! Its been exciting to see your trajectory from Fake Science into Vox and now your solo adventures!

[kavich]

Honestly, the production quality of your videos makes me feel like i'm watching Netflix, it's pristine!
And i find it incredible that even with the fancy edits and topics you can still make it entertaining and funny!

[stevenjlovelace]

I know you didn't want to get too technical, but UTF-8 had a big effect on Unicode's adoption. ASCII used 7 or 8 bits of data, while the earliest Unicode standards used 16. But for ASCII text (which includes, say, the HTML that makes up every web page, even in non-Latin languages), half the data would just be a bunch of zeroes. If they wanted to include more that ~65, 000 characters, they'd have to extend it to 32-bits, and a full three quarters of plain Latin text would be zeroes. This would suck even now, but in an age of dialup modems, it was a non-starter. UTF-8 allows us to vary the number of bits for each character: 8, 16. 24, and 32, or even more if we include combining characters that allow you to change the color of hair on an emoji character.

[VictorMartinez-zfdt]

As a computer geek this video tickles me nicely. We deal with unicode and it's weirdness as software developers all the time. It's nice for the general public to understand why sometimes we have this weirdness.

[NadiimNafei]

I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that that the addition of Egyptian Hieroglyphs to unicode was a pretty significant step in Egyptological research as it helped simplify communication in research (referring to hieroglyphs in writing in a shared, standardized way)
I have a hard time finding the article I read, so perhaps my memory is off, but that’s what I remember 😅

[fgsaldanha]

In the late 90s and early 2000s, when browsers did not fully support Unicode yet, non-English speakers had to adapt to writing without special chacterters. This was the beginning of a kind of "dialects" initially intended to circumvent that technical limitations, but quickly became youth slang (and the terror of many teachers and parents).

[niranjanr]

Learning Unicode's history was never this fun, and made me realize it's importance.

Also, I genuinely love your style and take on video essays like this. Must've taken some time to reach that balance.

[mikea.]

LOL who remembers receiving text messages with a bunch of squares thinking what is wrong with my phone.

[palmercolson]

I remember Ron and Don's issue well. In the 1980s, I was using a Unix computer that used Ascii for its characters and I had to produce a tape of W-2 data for the IRS which had to be in EBCDIC which is the code that was used by IBM. I had to use the dd ommand to convert the text and write it to tape and produce a file that the IRS would accept. For some reason, it took a lot of work to get it to work right.

The other similar issue was that Unix used linefeed to terminate text lines and both VAX/VMS and the new PC's used carriage return/linefeed combinations. Transferring files had to take that into account.

[EvenFilms]

Okay I legitimately blurted out laughing when the B&W guy asked if he could leave after his segment was over. 😂 You keep coming up with great ways of playing with tropes of educational videos. I immediately imagined all talking head interviewees as being trapped in the video, waiting to be cut to again.

You’re killing it, Phil! Best video on this topic I have ever seen.

[CrocodileWhispers]

great editing as always Mr. Edwards. Thank you for your work, quite entertaining.

[matts]

I find it interesting that there is actually a common language (of sorts) that Unicode doesn't fully support: Math expressions. A format called Latex is much more common in math equation setting, and while Unicode does have some stuff for this, its not nearly as good.

[affechristoph]

I'm a very technical guy who is not afraid of using the command line and it's text-based applications. Having Unicode there is very useful if you want things to be more useful or just to be more beautiful. Also, I learn Japanese using the internet, which is now possible due to Unicode.
Well made video, ありがとうございます！