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Unicode Reaches Outer Space

Written by Patrick Hall, September 22nd, 2008

This is just so cool I have to quote the whole email from the Unicode list:

On http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/release/iau0807/ , the IAU (International Astronomical Union) publishes a press release of 2008-09-17 “IAU names fifth dwarf planet Haumea”.

There, also the names of two moons of this dwarf planet are announced, the larger of them being named Hiʻiaka (after a Hawaiian goddess).

It is pleasant to see that this name is in fact spelled correctly in the recent version of that press release, including U+02BB as the correct encoding for the Hawaiian ʻokina. This even is done in the plain text file downloadable from that site, which is UTF-8 encoded.

Thus we have now a celestial body which is officially given a name which requires Unicode to be spelled correctly, rather than simply ASCII (aka ISO 646) or ISO 8859-1.

- Karl Pentzlin

(emphasis added)

If you’re wondering what the heck an ʻokina is, therein lies a story, but I’ll just refer you to Wikipedia.

1 Comment for 'Unicode Reaches Outer Space'

  1. Comment received September 22nd, 2008 from Chris Waigl

    I’m in love with the term “trans-neptunian object”.

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