Diving In

Question: what’s the #1 cause of gibberish text on the web, in your inbox, and across every computer system ever written? It’s character encoding. In the Strings chapter, I talked about the history of character encoding and the creation of Unicode, the “one encoding to rule them all.” I’d love it if I never had to see a gibberish character on a web page again, because all authoring systems stored accurate encoding information, all transfer protocols were Unicode-aware, and every system that handled text maintained perfect fidelity when converting between encodings.

I’d also like a pony.

A Unicode pony.

A Unipony, as it were.

I’ll settle for character encoding auto-detection.