Around the World With Unicode

>, at the expense of undermining the entire point of Unicode.

I'm not a Unicode history expert but did the author (Nora Sandler) accurately represent the philosophical intentions of Unicode?

Specifically, she quotes: "Unicode provides a unique number for every character,"

Is "every character" underspecified? What's the philosophy of Unicode? Is it to:

a) map a codepoint for every semantic character?

b) map a codepoint for every visual character?

Here's a non-CJK example of the single tick (′) character U+2032 [1]:

That has 3 different semantics:

  1) foot mark e.g. 3′ to a yard
  2) prime mark e.g. f′(x)
  3) coordinates minutes e.g. 48°51′24″N

In each case, the character's rendering to screen and printer look identical so Unicode used the same codepoint for 3 different meanings. Even if Unicode created 3 separate codepoints for 3 separate meanings of (′), semantic fidelity would be lost anyway since authors would often choose the first glyph visually that "looked like" the tick mark they wanted. Or they'd probably just use U+0027, the traditional ASCII apostrophe (') since it's the easiest to type on a keyboard.

Put another way, was Unicode intended to create codepoints at the level of characters-the-visual-look or at the level of language character sets? It looks like Unicode chose the visual look which is why 3 uses of tick marks and many Han characters collapse to single codepoints. If the "entire point of Unicode" was for the 1-to-many mapping of codepoints to map to language sets, that means that there would be a contiguous array of Han codepoints for Chinese and another set of Han codepoints for Korean -- with many duplicates. Is there evidence that that was the "correct" idea for Unicode and somehow politics or technical debates de-duplicated the CJK characters?

Yes, there are some duplicate characters such as math symbols and Greek language letters so maybe Unicode philosophy has no single consistent idea of what a codepoint maps to.

[1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2032/index.htm