title: What is normalized UTF-8 all about?
body: <p>The <a href="http://userguide.icu-project.org/transforms/normalization">ICU project</a> (which also now has a <a href="http://us.php.net/manual/en/class.normalizer.php">PHP library</a>) contains the classes needed to help normalize UTF-8 strings to make it easier to compare values when searching.</p>
  
  <p>However, I'm trying to figure out <a href="http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/">what this means</a> for applications. For example, in which cases do I want "Canonical Equivalence" instead of "Compatibility equivalence", or vis-versa?</p>