This is a story that dates back to the earliest days of computers. The story has a plot, well, sort of. It has competition and intrigue, as well as traversing oodles of countries and languages. There is conflict and resolution, and a happyish ending. But the main focus is the characters ” 110,116 of them. By the end of the story, they will all find their own unique place in this world. This story (or article, as known on Smashing Magazine) will follow a few of those characters more closely, as they journey from Web server to browser, and back again. Along the way, you’ll find out more about the history of characters, character sets, Unicode and UTF-8, and why question marks and odd accented characters sometimes show up in databases and text files.
» Paul Tero | smashingmagazine.com