Over the weekend I built Unicode Lookup, a tool that lets you search for any Unicode character by name, or by codepoint number. A table of the characters with their decimal, octal, hex, and HTML entity representations is shown as results.

The core purpose of the tool is to aid web-development by making it easy to find the HTML entity for any character. It’s also useful for finding a character by class (e.g. math symbols) for copy & paste into documents.

As ASCII is a subset of Unicode, the tool also serves as a full ASCII (and Latin-1 etc) character reference.

Unicode Lookup is based on John Walker’s command-line tool unum.

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.

Secretly? Here’s what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won’t decrease Dean Hachamovitch’s big year-end bonus by one cent.

This is a great, entertaining article from Joel that explores the legacy of browser (non) standards and backwards compatibility, and Microsoft’s tough choice between idealism and pragmatism.