In essence Unicode identifies characters and numbers by assigning a specific number or sequence of numbers to that character or number. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for representing numbers and characters, none of which were suitable for representing all of the characters that may be needed on various computer systems, and also conflicted with one another by using the same number for two different characters. Unicode solves these issues by providing a unique number for every character. The premise of Unicode is to provide a universal system, ‘no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language’.
By using this standard in its encoded form of UTF-8, localisation engineers and those involved in presenting multi-languages allows users many scripts over a variety of platforms.
The process involved in encoding your files (specifically HTML) is fairly straightforward. Firstly you will need to ensure the file is saved as a UTF-8 file. Both graphic based HTML editors (such as Adobe Dreamweaver
) and text based editors such as Notepad make allowances to save as this file top. Often this will be set as default prior to commencing editing the files however it is worth validating this.
You will also need to declare encoding in your page. The example below shows how this can be done in a standard HTML page. Please note the declaration will need to be declared in the tag of a HTML page. scienceshops.