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Why was there a unicode standard before unicode 8?


Asked by Lia Vazquez on Dec 14, 2021 FAQ



The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee [2] (Yes, that's a thing) discusses and reviews proposals based on a number of criteria. Prior to Unicode 8, updates to the Unicode Standard were almost exclusively based on compatibility with existing systems and encoding standards.
Furthermore,
The standard was created on an encoding foundation large enough to support the writing systems used by all the world’s languages. Over the years the Unicode standard encoding has been steadily expanded and now includes languages like Cherokee, Mongolian, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
And, Unicode is the standard that maps characters to codepoints. Each character has a unique codepoint (identification number), which is a number like 9731. UTF-8 is an the encoding of the codepoints. In order to store all characters on disk (in a file), UTF-8 splits characters into up to 4 octets (8-bit sequences) - bytes.
Accordingly,
Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The Unicode standard defines Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF): UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, and several other encodings.
Also Know,
Unicode standard doesn’t freeze, it continues to evolve. In June 2015 was released version 8.0. More than 120 thousands characters coded for now. The Consortium does not create new symbols, just add often used.