[Overview]
First published in January 1991, Unicode is the universal character
encoding maintained by the Unicode Consortium. "Unicode provides a
unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no
matter what the program, no matter what the language." (excerpt from
the website) This double-byte platform-independent encoding provides a
basis for the processing, storage and interchange of text data in any
language, and any modern software and information technology protocols.
Unicode is a component of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
specifications.