Hacker News Reader

An excellent article, although:

> “Ü” is a single grapheme cluster, even though it’s composed of two codepoints: U+0055 UPPER-CASE U followed by U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS.

would be a great opportunity to talk about normal form, because there’s also a single code point version: “latin capital letter u with diaeresis”.

View on HN

Does anyone know the history behind why there’s two ways to “encode” things like that? What’s the rationale for having both combining and precombined codepoints?

I believe a lot of the "combined" characters are (basically) from importing old codepages directly into Unicode, and they did that so it would be a simple formula to convert from the various codepages in use.

I may be wrong however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com