XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Unicode

Unicode is an international standard character set that can be used to write documents in almost any language you’re likely to speak, learn, or encounter in your lifetime, barring alien abduction. Version 4.0.1, the current version as of June, 2004, contains 96,447 characters from most of Earth’s living languages as well as several dead ones. Unicode easily covers the Latin alphabet, in which most of this book is written. Unicode also covers Greek-derived scripts, including ancient and modern Greek and the Cyrillic scripts used in Serbia and much of the former Soviet Union. Unicode covers several ideographic scripts, including the Han character set used for Chinese and Japanese, the Korean Hangul syllabary, and phonetic representations of these languages, including Katakana and Hiragana. It covers the right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It covers various scripts native to the Indian subcontinent, including Devanagari, Thai, Bengali, Tibetan, and many more. And that’s still less than half of the scripts in Unicode 4.0. Probably less than one person in a thousand today speaks a language that cannot be reasonably represented in Unicode. In the future, Unicode will add still more characters, making this fraction even smaller. Unicode can potentially hold more than a million characters, but no one is willing to say in public where they think most of the remaining million characters will come from.^[2]

The Unicode character set assigns characters to code points; that is, numbers. ...