The Unicode Standard defines a consistent way of encoding multilingual text necessary for easy electronic exchange of text data and is the default encoding of HTML and XML on the Web. Treating all characters (textual, ideographic, and symbolic) equivalently, it requires no control codes or escape sequences. It is also conformant with international standard ISO/IEC 10646. Version 4.0 has added Old Italic, Gothic, Deseret, Shavian, Cypriot, Ugaritic, Tai Le, and other scripts and has doubled the number of Han ideographs. This text explains the use of the standard and provides code charts for 96,248 common characters. The CD-ROM contains the entire Unicode Character database, as well as the text of the Unicode Standard Annexes. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less