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Web Bookmarks for the Unicode® Standard
Current Practice for Web Bookmarks
Starting with Unicode 16.0, the definitive edition of the core specification is the HTML version. For any given Unicode version, the core specification is accessible via a versioned URL of the form:
Version-specific Bookmarks
Stable bookmarks (permalinks) for any chapter, section, table, or figure of the core specification can be extracted directly from the online text. Elements with stable anchors for bookmarks show a "#" symbol in the left margin when they are hovered over. That symbol is the permalink pointing to the element itself, and it can be clicked on or copied from. So, for example, the following bookmark points directly to Section 12.1.3, Rendering Devanagari in Unicode 16.0:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-12/#G78484
Version-independent Bookmarks
Anchors for bookmarks are maintained across versions of the core specification, so it is also possible to refer to the latest version of the core specification:
Because the anchors for bookmarks are global IDs in the text, a bookmark to specific text in the latest version omits the chapter directory, just using the anchor at the top level. For example:
Using this convention future proofs your bookmark against possible future restructuring of parts of the core specification, which conceivably could split chapters or move some portion of the text into another chapter.
Best Practice for Labeling Links
When labeling links into the latest core specification, it is best practice not to cite specific section, figure, or table numbers, as the exact numbers may change between versions. Thus, for example, the figure illustrating Tamil Two-Part Vowels happens to be Figure 12-17 in Unicode 16.0, so a version-specific link could be labeled as follows:
Figure 12-17, Tamil Two-Part Vowels in Unicode 16.0.
But a version-independent link to that table in the latest core specification would better omit the specific figure number:
The figure Tamil Two-Part Vowels in the Unicode Standard.
Bookmarks for the Archival PDF for the Core Specification
The anchors for chapters, sections, figures, and tables in the core specification also work for the single, archival PDF of the core specification. Because the archival PDF is a single file, and is not broken up into chapter-specific files, the anchors should be suffixed directly to the archival PDF file name. Thus, for example, the Rendering Devanagari section can be bookmarked in the 16.0 archival PDF as follows:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/UnicodeStandard-16.0.pdf#G78484
Legacy Practice for Web Bookmarks
For Unicode versions prior to Unicode 16.0, and extending back to Unicode 6.0, the PDF versions of the core specification are definitive, and there was no HTML edition available online. Because bookmarks were more difficult to locate and extract from those PDF files, the Unicode Consortium published version-specific bookmarks pages for each version of the core specification. Each bookmarks page lists the contents of that version and has links to the chapters, sections, subsections, figures, and tables of the core specification.
For Unicode 4.0 and 5.0, the published book versions of the standard were definitive, but per chapter PDF files were also published online for those versions. Accordingly, there are also web bookmarks pages for those versions, as well.
Legacy Web Bookmarks Pages
Versions of the Unicode Standard for which the core specification was not published as separate online PDFs, such as Version 5.1, do not have web bookmarks and are therefore not included in this list. Bookmarks for versions prior to Version 6.0 do not include bookmarks for figures or tables.
Bookmarks to sections of the text for specific versions of the Unicode core specification needed to include the specific chapter pdf. Thus, for example, the link for the Rendering Devanagari subsection in Version 11.0 of the core specification is:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/ch12.pdf#G78484
And the link for the corresponding subsection in Version 6.0 of the core specification is:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ch09.pdf#G78484
Note that every attempt is made to keep bookmarks stable between versions — the structure of the core specification is only modified when necessary, and section numbering, figures, and tables are kept as stable as possible. However, section, figure, or table numbering occasionally changes between versions. Even in such cases, the bookmarks still work correctly, but may be pointing to a section with a different number. For example, Dogra in Version 12.0 is Section 15.16, but Dogra in Version 13.0 is Section 15.17. However, in both cases, the actual pdf file for the chapter and the anchor for the bookmark are identical, so the bookmarks will continue to point to the expected material across versions, even though the section numbering has changed.
Redirection of Legacy Latest Bookmarks
In the legacy scheme for core specification bookmarks, it was possible to use the mechanism of replacing the specific version with the "latest" version in the URL, to obtain links that would continue to work across versions. However, those latest links would only work as long as the content they pointed to stayed in the same chapter. Thus in the example above for the Rendering Devanagari subsection, a latest link created in the 6.0 version time frame would start to fail in the 7.0 version time frame (and later), because the Devanagari section moved from Chapter 9 to Chapter 12, as various chapters were split.
Starting with Unicode 16.0, any such legacy latest URLs are automatically redirected to the corresponding content in the current (HTML) version of the core specification. So the following legacy latest URLs are both correctly redirected:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/ch12.pdf#G78484 [created in Unicode 11.0 time frame]
https://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/ch09.pdf#G78484 [created in Unicode 6.0 time frame]
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