Encodings and Unicode

David C. Zentgraf over at Kunststube.net has a useful post about character encodings, Unicode, and UTF-X. The post is entitled What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text, which is a pretty good summary of its content. I’m confident that almost all Irreal readers will already know this material but if you’re confused about the difference between Unicode and UTF-8 or some other UTF encoding then you may find this post enlightening. Similarly, if you have non-technical friends who want a succinct explanation of why they’re getting a stream of gibberish characters in their browser this may be a good resource.