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Unicode
Last modified: Wednesday, December 11, 2002
A standard for representing characters as integers. Unlike ASCII, which uses 7 bits for each character, Unicode uses 16 bits, which means that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters. This is a bit of overkill for English and Western-European languages, but it is necessary for some other languages, such as Greek, Chinese and Japanese. Many analysts believe that as the software industry becomes increasingly global, Unicode will eventually supplant ASCII as the standard character coding format.
History of Unicode This document describes the history of the Unicode standard, with mentions of the standards organizations involved with its design.
Unicode home page Contains information about the Unicode standard as well as International conferences, and online resources.
