Foreword

Unicode began with a simple goal: to unify the many hundreds of separate character encodings into a single, universal standard. These character encodings were incomplete and inconsistent: Two encodings would use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) needed to support many different encodings, yet whenever data was passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always ran the risk of corruption.

Unicode was designed to fix that situation: to provide a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

Unfortunately, Unicode has not remained quite as simple as we ...

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