https://owl.billpg.com/tags/unicode/Recent content in Unicode on billpg industries™Hugoen-us© William Godfrey.Fri, 29 May 2026 05:21:11 +0000https://owl.billpg.com/on-no-ive-invented-svg-badly/Fri, 29 May 2026 05:21:11 +0000https://owl.billpg.com/on-no-ive-invented-svg-badly/<p>It started, as these things often do, with a tiny spark of inspiration. I was looking at the way Unicode builds those racially diverse family emoji. These use ZWJ sequences to glue together adults, children, and skin‑tone modifiers into a single little glyph. It’s clever, constrained, and surprisingly elegant. It gave me an idea.</p> <p>What if you could do the same thing for flags? Unicode already has national flag emojis along with 🏳️‍🌈, 🏳️‍⚧️, 🏴‍☠️, 🏁,🏳️,🏴,🚩 and the countries-in-our-hearts, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿. But no more. The people in charge of assigning codes have decided this is too much of a geopolitical and culture-war nightmare so these are all the flags we&rsquo;re going to get.</p>https://owl.billpg.com/the-expanding-universe-of-unicode/Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:40:40 +0000https://owl.billpg.com/the-expanding-universe-of-unicode/<p>Before Unicode, digital text lived in a fragmented world of 8-bit encodings. ASCII had settled in as the good-enough-for-English core, taking up the first half of codes, but the other half was a mish-mash of regional code pages that mapped characters differently depending on locale. One set for accented Latin letters, another set for Cyrillic.</p> <p>Each system carried its own assumptions, collisions, and blind spots. Unicode emerged as a unifying vision. a single character set for all human languages, built on a 16-bit foundation. All developers had to do was swap their 8-bit loops for 16-bit loops. Some bristled that half the bytes were all zeros, but this was for the greater good.</p>