A while ago I found a website written by a guy named Joel Spolsky when I was looking for more information about character sets. Character sets are those mysterious things that tell the computer what combination of binary digits corresponds to familiar characters like ‘A’, or ‘B’, and those less familiar, like ‘Ж’ (zheh), ‘א’ (aleph), ‘փ’ (P`iur) or ‘東’ (dōng, “East”).

The history of character sets is long, twisted and boring. It’s full of people making mistakes and arbitrary decisions in the 80s and forever scarring the future of computing. It’s full of people demanding that the Armenian alphabet be supported, and those demanding that Windows display Klingon correctly. (Incidentally, Wikipedia has been translated into Klingon, along with Google, now I like Star Trek, but that’s really taking it too far.)

Joel Spolsky, however, wrote an article in 2003 which manages to be both informative and interesting. What’s more, it’s actually funny! Now I may not be the world’s foremost expert on how to write well, but I certainly can recognise a miracle when I see one.

So if you’ve been wondering what on Earth ‘Unicode’ is, or what ‘character set’ means, take a look at The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). Even if you’re only slightly interested, you’ll enjoy it.

And if that’s not enough, I just found something that everyone who has ever read Jakob Nielsen will be able to identify with:

“Every time I read Jakob Nielsen,” [Joel] wrote in 2000, “I get this feeling that he really doesn’t appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone’s number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you’d never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other.”