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Do you know of a resource that explains character encoding in greater detail? Just for my own curiosity. I am learning web development and boy, they brow beat UTF-8 upon us which okay, I'll make sure that call is in my meta data, but none bother to explain how or why we got to that point, or why it seems so splintered.

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(very late reply, but in case you see it)

This Joel On Software article [0] is a good starting point. Incredibly it's now over 20 years old so that makes me feel ancient! But still relevant today.

The suggestion that the web should just use utf-8 everywhere is largely true today. But we still have to interact with other software that may not use utf-8 for various legacy reasons - the CSV file example in the original article is a good example. Joel's article also mentions the solution discussed in the original article, i.e. use heuristics to deduce the encoding.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...

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