Text online is finally going global. Google now supports Unicode 5.1, an important milestone for any technical communicator. Why this is important? Text from DJCline.com. Besides Unicode, there are several encoding standards used on online ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252. They tend to handle a limited set of languages like English or Spanish. Unicode handles Arabic, Chinese and even Malayalam. More text will be easier to search, translate and display.

I should note that Unicode is another example of an open international standard where everyone benefits. With easier translation comes better communication and greater understanding. It will speed up research and development. It is a Rosetta Stone that everyone in the future will be able to read.

Mark Davis, Senior International Software Architect at Google has written about it at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51.html

Copyright 2008 DJ Cline All rights reserved.

Posted by dj in Commentary [787 Views]