Tadpole code convert any <4k string to a 'single' character (Unicode magic)
c.goozo.net
c.goozo.net
This would suggest this means that you can create a dynamic font/character in unicode. I had no idea this was possible, can someone confirm/slap me down for saying silly things?
It's not actually compression, according to the author, the 'single character' is 6x larger than the original UTF8 bytes.
An important task of unicode encoding/decoding is inter-converting between the two forms. For example if you require a name to be unique, and one form uses combining characters and the other doesn't, they are identical, but different.
Update: Actually, sending a short one via the twitter client I'm working on seems to mangle it as it won't decode after it's posted. Posted short ones via the web interface will decode correctly, though. There must be a unicode handling bug somewhere...
example screenshot grabbed from reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/an4qa/tadpole_c...
I wish I were a tadpole