Clarification on Joel Spolsky's Unicode article

Question

I'm reading the popular Unicode article from Joel Spolsky and there's one illustration that I don't understand.

1. What does "Hex Min, Hex Max" mean? What do those values represent? Min and max of what?

2. Binary can only have 1 or 0. Why do I see tons of letter "v" here?

---

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

---

Answer 1

The Hex Min/Max define the range of unicode characters (typically represented by their unicode number in HEX).

The v is referring to the bits of the original number

So the first line is saying:

The unicode characters in the range 0 (hex 00) to 127 (hex 7F) (a 7 bit number) are represented by a 1 byte bit string starting with '0' followed by all 7 bits of the unicode number.

The second line is saying:

The unicode numbers in the range 128 (hex 0800) to 2047 (07FF) (an 11 bit number) are represented by a 2 byte bit string where the first byte starts with '110' followed by the first 5 of the 11 bits, and the second byte starts with '10' followed by the remaining 6 of the 11 bits

etc

Hope that makes sense