This is not a picture of a foot. Well, it's a picture of a foot. But I can Google it,
and text it, and tweet it — I didn't tweet it. See, this is the Egyptian hieroglyphic
for foot. You've probably seen videos with weird characters like this or Tom Scott's
experiments with them. But what's going on here? These aren't just emojis. It's deeper
than that. They're part of a standard that governs almost
all of the Internet with characters like this, this, and this. And it's even been the source
of international controversy. How did it happen? Now we're starting our screen grab here. This
is just one of the most inexplicably fun things to do — playing cards so you can search
for a playing card with a playing card. So cool. Now, as I mentioned, there are already
videos that touch on the mysteries involved behind all these different letters. But they're
usually kind of tech-oriented. And there's no basic explanation of the history
that is involved. So this video is not going to be this: “the Unicode standard is a common
code data repository.” But it also won't be this: “Where do emojis come from and
why is fire so fire? And what about this little stinker? Well, it's going to land somewhere
in the middle.” All of these symbols are possible because
of Unicode. Let's just walk through, in a straightforward way, what's going on here.
Imagine an uppercase A, so that is this, this, this, and this. But those are all different
fonts. They have to map to some universal A instruction. That's what Unicode does. It
says, I'm going to give you a number for A and every computer and font and operating
system is going to use that same number. It is a standard. So let's do the vocab. That
number is called a code point and the font turns it into a glyph. So because they have
different meanings: A, À, Á, , Ã, and Ä all get their own code point. Font designers
can then choose how many of these code points that they want to draw letters for.
Google's Noto is one of the most famous font families because they drew out a ton of Unicode
characters for it. But that still doesn't explain this. I mean, Egyptian hieroglyphics?
To understand why those would be part of Unicode, you have to learn a little bit about its history.
Okay, so this ruggedly handsome actor is portraying Ronald.
“Computers are going to help us beat those dirty communists.”
But he has a problem across the country. There's Don.
“Hi, Ron.” “Don.”
“Ron.” “Don.”
But Don is using a different standard. Remember, there's no Unicode yet. So when Don sends
Ron a letter about a duck, the number that he assigns to D might be the number that Ron
assigns to the letter F. “I have never seen this word before, and
I don't like the way it makes me feel.” So everyone agrees that you have to create
a standard, the most famous of which is the ASCII standard, which you might be familiar
with from ASCII art. Okay, stop that immediately. Here is the first 1963 document that established
ASCII. And here's the table that set the rules. You can see the Uppercase A right here. Later,
they filled those unassigned areas with lowercase letters.
Here's the 1972 version of ASCII with a lot of wrinkles ironed out. There's our capital
A, but a lowercase a too. That wasn't enough. ASCII only had room for 128 characters. Look
at that again. Try writing Russian with that. “Did you say Russian? You dirty communist
son of a…” Or even languages with accents? I mean, how
did they work? So everybody started creating their own standards or tacking on to ASCII.
Bill had one, Steve had one. This was a huge mess. There were a ton of different versions
now for every single country. This is all the background for a proposal that we call
Unicode 88. “Excuse me, am I done here?”
You're good. “Okay.”
Unicode 88 showed up in this landscape of chaos and rivalry. One of the coauthors, Joe
Becker, had been thinking about multilingual word processing for a while, but with different
ideas. Unicode 88 cemented a plan to expand ASCII's
abilities to reliable real-world text encoding. The paper actually organized languages by
gross national product to show which ones they should tackle first, and most importantly,
brought up the number of code point possibilities to more than 65,000. Wow, right? It was even
backward compatible with ASCII, through some clever organizing that made the first 128
Unicode code points the same as ASCII's numbers. It also plainly stated, "Is it possible to
engineer a reasonable definition of character such that all the world scripts contain fewer
than 65,536 of them? The answer to this is yes.” The Unicode Consortium was created
in 1991, and every engineer suddenly became a cool nineties grunge guy. “I've got opinions
about Pearl Jam.” I found this 1995 article where lots of commentators
recognized that Unicode may hold the most promise for making the internet multilingual.
But what about the foot? I mean, what about stuff like hieroglyphics, and why would YouTube
end up supporting it? Well, almost immediately, Unicode realized that they had made the same
mistake as ASCII. Still too few characters. So there are thousands upon thousands of Japanese,
Korean, and Chinese characters. They often refer to the same words or ideas, and they
have differences that seem minimal to Westerners or people like me who don't know how to read
them. Unicode decided they could save a ton of space
if they consolidated all these Han characters under the same numbers, proudly saying they'd
avoided making tens of thousands of code points. Some people in Japan, China, and Korea did
not think that this was so elegant of a solution. Imagine, it's like Unicode said, A and À
are the same thing. It's like sort of fine, but also totally wrong.
That is what they did with the Han characters. They said characters that look different but
had the same definition meant the same thing. Now, listen, I'm not going to pretend that
I learned how to read all these characters for this video. All these different images
were transformed to one code point. People could choose a different type of font
that might properly render the difference between the characters, but that's not how
it's supposed to be done in Unicode. Unicode was supposed to have one code point for every
single idea of a letter. This controversy became known as Han Unification. People from
each of these countries protested that doing that erased important etymological and historical
differences between the ways that each country wrote the characters.
After this debate, I would argue that Unicode suddenly kind of became sensitive to the idea
of non-English needs for their standard. In addition, they must have known that a newer,
bigger, and more comprehensive standard would have threatened theirs. And finally, rising
computer capabilities kind of meant that there wasn't a reason not to include more and more
characters. So they made tech upgrades and they started
adding code point after code point after code point. This chart, adapted from John Cook,
shows the growth in Unicode characters. And that's where we are today. I mean, today,
Unicode adds many ancient and very obscure languages, and in 2010, they also took control
over the code points for emojis. Just like letters, there's a code point in the glyph
for spaghetti, which is why different apps render it differently.
Unicode ballooned to 149,186 characters. So that's the answer to our question. The hieroglyphic
foot is a part of Unicode, and different companies say they want to support every possible language,
so they support Unicode, and the foot comes along for the ride. This chart, adapted from
Google's index of web pages, shows how Unicode usage soared as ASCII use fell.
The Unicode standard surpassed ASCII in 2007 or 2008, and it has only grown since. There
are other controversies over characters that I didn't get into, but you can imagine what
they might be. But I'm going to leave you with the positive – this is a really hard
problem— at the scale of human expression — yet we've kind of done a good job with
it. We have found a solution, and the truth is that sometimes a solution looks like
a foot. Okay, that's it for this one. Thank you for
watching. Yeah, I love looking at all the different Unicode characters. I didn't get
into a bunch of the technical details, but those are out there on YouTube if you want
to learn more about how it works – there are planes, UTF-8, and UTF-16, UT— there's
a lot, and you can find that. That's what YouTube is good for. But I wanted
to provide a general history. So hopefully, this gives you an idea of how we got the internet,
computers, and operating systems that work across various languages.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel. It's where I post personal
videos, history videos, and stuff like that. I've got a reaction video to this one over
on Patreon. I like to go into all the stuff that I left out of the video proper, just
because it would have been too long, and then I give you the details there. So yeah, maybe
you'll join me over there. If not, I hope to see you in the next video regardless.
All right. Thanks for watching and happy typing. Oh, this comment section! This comment section
is a challenge to have some very interesting Unicode characters in it, so I am sure you
will meet the challenge. All right. Bye.
⚡️🔮✨ 𝔻𝕖𝕒𝕣 𝕔𝕒𝕡𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕣𝕤, 𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕜 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕡𝕒𝕪𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕒𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕥𝕠 𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕪 𝕕𝕖𝕥𝕒𝕚𝕝. 𝕐𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕞𝕒𝕘𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 𝕡𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣𝕤 𝕠𝕗 𝕠𝕓𝕤𝕖𝕣𝕧𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕝𝕪 𝕒𝕡𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕚𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕕. 𝕄𝕒𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕤𝕒𝕝 𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕘𝕦𝕒𝕘𝕖 𝕠𝕗 𝕌𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖 𝕓𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕛𝕠𝕪, 𝕨𝕚𝕤𝕕𝕠𝕞, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕖𝕟𝕝𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥.✨🔮⚡️