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An entertaining article, but it's not historically accurate. If you look at measured usage, UTF-8 took off around 2005 and was the dominant web encoding by 2008

by kens 6y ago

An entertaining article, but it's not historically accurate. If you look at measured usage, UTF-8 took off around 2005 and was the dominant web encoding by 2008. Emojis weren't added to Unicode until 2010, at which point UTF-8 usage continued to increase at exactly the same rate as before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowth.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowt...

crazygringo 6y ago
Yes, very misleading clickbait title. I was expecting some actual insightful anecdote about a pivotal choice by a major tech company that made all the difference. But nothing at all.
redisman 6y ago
Does anyone know the real reason? Languages upgraded string to default to utf8? Browsers changed their defaults?
- larzang 6y ago
  Dealing with the hell of mixed ISO-8859-1/15 vs CP-1252 vs UTF-8 vs simple ASCII was enough to make me an early embracer of UTF-everywhere despite mostly only having to deal with English language sources. "Someone copy/pasted from Word and broke the database again" are words you don't want to ever have to hear. UTF-8 was the sane refactoring after the initial incompatible parallel standards were established.
- MrRadar 6y ago
  It's probably down to browser/OS support and the increasing importance of user-generated content on the web. Windows only got Unicode support by default on the consumer side with Windows XP which launched in 2001. Mac OS X was also released in 2001 and had Unicode support from the start (unlike Classic Mac OS which had it bolted on with poor app support). Similarly, according to this old blog post I dug up[1] Internet Explorer only got good Unicode support with 5.5 in 2000, and Netscape never had good Unicode support. Firefox, which had Unicode support from the start, was released around 2002. By 2006, which is clearly an inflection point on that graph, browsers and OSes with poor Unicode support were highly obsolete and global social media platforms like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, which needed Unicode to enable sharing of user posts between users writing in different languages, were on the ascendance. [1] https://www.worldtimzone.com/2002/09/24/ https://www.worldtimzone.com/2002/09/24/
mpol 6y ago
Hmm, in MySQL land you have utf8, which means utf8mb3, and utf8mb4. Only the latter supports Emoji. It is only in the last releases that utf8mb4 is supported and also the default character set. I work with WordPress a lot, and up to 3 years ago it was quite common for MySQL setups at shared hosting providers to only support utf8mb3. And Emoji support really did help here to move it forward.
- riteshpatel 6y ago
  We changed our tables to utf8mb4 specifically for emoji support

by kens 6y ago

crazygringo 6y ago

Yes, very misleading clickbait title. I was expecting some actual insightful anecdote about a pivotal choice by a major tech company that made all the difference. But nothing at all.

redisman 6y ago

Does anyone know the real reason? Languages upgraded string to default to utf8? Browsers changed their defaults?

larzang 6y ago
Dealing with the hell of mixed ISO-8859-1/15 vs CP-1252 vs UTF-8 vs simple ASCII was enough to make me an early embracer of UTF-everywhere despite mostly only having to deal with English language sources. "Someone copy/pasted from Word and broke the database again" are words you don't want to ever have to hear. UTF-8 was the sane refactoring after the initial incompatible parallel standards were established.
MrRadar 6y ago
It's probably down to browser/OS support and the increasing importance of user-generated content on the web. Windows only got Unicode support by default on the consumer side with Windows XP which launched in 2001. Mac OS X was also released in 2001 and had Unicode support from the start (unlike Classic Mac OS which had it bolted on with poor app support). Similarly, according to this old blog post I dug up[1] Internet Explorer only got good Unicode support with 5.5 in 2000, and Netscape never had good Unicode support. Firefox, which had Unicode support from the start, was released around 2002. By 2006, which is clearly an inflection point on that graph, browsers and OSes with poor Unicode support were highly obsolete and global social media platforms like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, which needed Unicode to enable sharing of user posts between users writing in different languages, were on the ascendance. [1] https://www.worldtimzone.com/2002/09/24/ https://www.worldtimzone.com/2002/09/24/

mpol 6y ago

Hmm, in MySQL land you have utf8, which means utf8mb3, and utf8mb4. Only the latter supports Emoji. It is only in the last releases that utf8mb4 is supported and also the default character set. I work with WordPress a lot, and up to 3 years ago it was quite common for MySQL setups at shared hosting providers to only support utf8mb3. And Emoji support really did help here to move it forward.

riteshpatel 6y ago
We changed our tables to utf8mb4 specifically for emoji support