Unicode

In the 1990s, the Unicode Consortium (an industry standards group) and ISO jointly developed Unicode. Unicode, sometimes referred to as ISO/IEC 10646, is a double-byte (16,536 values) encoding scheme that includes every written symbol in every living language, including Chinese and Japanese.

Unicode is an encoding scheme, not a code page. However, it is being widely implemented as a code page architecture in innovative information technology applications. For example, many database vendors, including Information Builders, now provide Unicode data types. Many computer and web technologies use Unicode for text data, including Java technologies, HTML, the XML family of languages, and Microsoft Windows and Office.

Employing Unicode for text data in computer technologies is a growing trend. Specifically, the operating system components of smart phones and tablets often use Unicode for all text data.