Unicode Demystified

Unicode and the Internet

Perhaps the area where Unicode will be most important over time is on the Internet. In this area, people all over the world can communicate with each other and access information. If they do so only in English, use of the Internet will be limited mostly to English-speaking countries. Instead, a growing movement calls for material on the Internet to be available in a wide variety of languages.

Of course, if you go beyond English, ASCII doesn't cut it any more as a method of representing characters. If you go outside the Western European languages, neither does Latin-1. This requirement means either designing the Internet protocols and the various pieces of software that speak them to handle many different character encoding ...