I\'m trying to find out how character sets/encoding are implemented in browsers, specifically Unicode.
I don't believe the browsers worry about the UCD at all.
A wellformed page will have a charset defined for it. Example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
Any text that is being displayed will have a list of fonts defined for it (in preferred order). Example:
p { font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; }
For any character on the page the browser simply looks up the glyph in the font definition. If there isn't one it moves to the next font in the list. If it lucks out completely it probably just uses whatever uber-font the OS provides (Arial).