#Greek question mark prank code#
W3’s recommended encoding for HTML is called UTF-8, which has 1,112,064 code points. ASCII, which you have probably heard of, was an early Latin alphabet encoding that had 128 code points, nothing near enough to cover all the possible characters people use. A character encoding contains a number of code points, each of which can encode one character. There are over 70,000 Chinese glyphs alone. Now, you can now start to see the scale of characters that need to be encoded as glyphs. Then there are the many other alphabets, such as Cyrillic (most widely known for containing the Russian language), Greek, Kanji (Japanese), and Chinese, many of which include more than one language. Diacritic symbols are things like accents, umlauts, cedillas, and other marks that change the pronunciation of a letter or word. The Latin alphabet includes most Western European languages and has a large number of diacritic symbols which aren’t used in English. And this only covers one language, English, which is in one alphabet, Latin (also known as the Roman alphabet).
So far, so simple, especially if you think there are only 26 characters in the alphabet, ten numbers, and some grammatical marks like ! or there are also 26 upper case letters and far more grammatical marks that you might realize (your keyboard only shows a small subset of possible grammatical marks, even for English). RELATED: What Are Character Encodings Like ANSI and Unicode, and How Do They Differ?
Behind the scenes, your computer represents these glyphs using a code that is interpreted by a program-like a web browser or a word processor-and then renders them on screen as a character. So every letter in this article is a glyph that represents a letter-a, b, c, and so on. The less-comprehensive explanation is that a character is a glyph that appears on screen when you type something. If you’re not sure what “character encoding” is, we’ve got a comprehensive explanation for you.