Appendix K Unicode (on CD) 1493 K.4 Advantages/Disadvantages
Appendix K Unicode (on CD) 1493 K.4 Advantages/Disadvantages of Unicode The Unicode Standard has several significant advantages that promote its use. One is the impact it has on the performance of the international economy. Unicode standardizes the characters for the world s writing systems to a uniform model that promotes transferring and sharing data. Programs developed using such a schema maintain their accuracy because each character has a single definition (i.e., a is always U+0061, % is always U+0025). This enables corporations to manage the high demands of international markets by processing different writing systems at the same time. Also, all characters can be managed in an identical manner, thus avoiding any confusion caused by different character code architectures. Moreover, managing data in a consistent manner eliminates data corruption, because data can be sorted, searched and manipulated using a consistent process. Another advantage of the Unicode Standard is portability (i.e., software that can execute on disparate computers or with disparate operating systems). Most operating systems, databases, programming languages and Web browsers currently support, or are planning to support, Unicode. A disadvantage of the Unicode Standard is the amount of memory required by UTF16 and UTF-32. ASCII character sets are 8-bits in length, so they require less storage than the default 16-bit Unicode character set. However, the double-byte character set (DBCS) and the multi-byte character set (MBCS) that encode Asian characters (ideographs) require two to four bytes, respectively. In such instances, the UTF-16 or the UTF-32 encoding forms may be used with little hindrance on memory and performance. Another disadvantage of Unicode is that although it includes more characters than any other character set in common use, it does not yet encode all of the world s written characters. Another disadvantage of the Unicode Standard is that UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable width encoding forms, so characters occupy different amounts of memory. K.5 Unicode Consortium s Web Site If you would like to learn more about the Unicode Standard, visit www.unicode.org. This site provides a wealth of information about the Unicode Standard that is insightful to those new to Unicode. Currently, the home page is organized into various sections New to Unicode, General Information, The Consortium, The Unicode Standard, Work in Progress and For Members. The New to Unicode section consists of two subsections: What is Unicode and How to Use this Site. The first subsection provides a technical introduction to Unicode by describing design principles, character interpretations and assignments, text processing and Unicode conformance. This subsection is recommended reading for anyone new to Unicode. Also, this subsection provides a list of related links that provide the reader with additional information about Unicode. The How to Use this Site subsection contains information about using and navigating the site as well hyperlinks to additional resources. The General Information section contains six subsections: Where is my Character, Display Problems, Useful Resources, Enabled Products, Mail Lists and Conferences. The main areas covered in this section include a link to the Unicode code charts (a complete listing of code values) assembled by the Unicode Consortium as well as a detailed outline on how to locate an encoded character in the code chart. Also, the section contains advice on how to configure different operating systems and Web browsers so that
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