the.com/encoding
the art of turning meaning into bytes and hoping the other end speaks the same lie back.
means a system for representing characters, data, or signals as numbers a machine can store and transmit.
from from latin codex via cryptographic code-making, repurposed by computing pioneers who needed a way to translate letters into bits without losing the plot.
ascii birth1963, just 128 characters, mostly english
utf-8 winbackwards compatible, now over 98% of web
mojibakegarbled text from mismatched encoding guesses
emoji costsome symbols eat four whole bytes