The Unicode Solution
In order to resolve this problem, a computer industry consortium was founded
to create a second generation of ASCII that addressed the problem of multiple
languages and alphabets, and the numerous special symbols used in scientific and
technical writing. This standard, called Unicode, specifies the use of 16-bit
characters in order to represent most of the known characters and languages in
modern writing.
The Unicode standard defines a character as the representation within a
computer or on storage media of the letters, punctuation, and other signs that
comprise natural language, mathematical, or scientific text. The character is not
what you see; glyphs appear on the screen or paper as a representation of one or
more characters. A complete set of glyphs make up a font. These definitions
will be used throughout the rest of this paper.
In attempting to solve the problem that users experience when communicating
between computers, Unicode has one fatal flaw: current computer systems
communicate in 7-bit or 8-bit bytes. Although support for Unicode is growing,
especially in the PC, Macintosh, and UNIX workstation markets, the vast majority of
computer users must use 8-bit character sets to communicate.