An International Cast of Characters

The standard is still in development and maintained by the UNICODE Consortium. According to the consortium, the standard supports "three encoding forms that use a common repertoire of characters but allow for encoding as many as a million more characters. This is sufficient for all known character encoding requirements, including full coverage of all historic scripts of the world, as well as common notational systems."

One of the most important aspects of any standard, which may seem tautological but not unimportant to stress, is the communication of that standard and its adoption as a standard.

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"The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products..."--Unicode Consortium.

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Beyond the computation challenge of Unicode, and as for any standard, universal adoption will be the key to its success.

Unicode, a work in progress that holds great promise for multilingual computing, may be understood on many levels depending on your needs. I recomment two valuable web resources that offer information about the standard, from the general to the technical, and will put you on the road to understanding the standard, its practical applications, limitations and future:

• The Unicode Consortium is the primary source for information about the standard. For the severely technologically impaired, like me, it may be hard to wrap your brain around some of the texts but, overall, the site is accessible and a gold mine of information.
• In order to understand how Unicode works, it helps to have a handle on the vocabulary. As consortium president Mark Davis wrote, "Unfortunately the term character is vastly overloaded." Davis' paper, written in 1999, goes a long way toward explaining the standard and the operative terms. Browse IBM's Unicode library for resources ranging from Unicode overviews to specific programming challenges related to the standard.
  The copyright of the article An International Cast of Characters in Export Marketing is owned by Nancy A. Locke. Permission to republish An International Cast of Characters in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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