First published in January 1991, 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.
Unicode is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, with its variants UTF-
8 (UTF: Unicode Transformation Format), UTF-16 and UTF-32, and is a
component of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications. In
2008, 50% of all the documents available on the internet were encoded
in Unicode, with the other 50% still encoded in ASCII, a 7-byte
encoding system dating back from 1968 for English and Latin, with 8-
byte "extensions" added then for a few European languages.