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Chances are you haven't heard a lot about the Unicode, or those that created it, and that's a shame. Unicode 5.0 has just been released, and believe it or not, it's a fascinating read.
There are fundamental standards that are constantly in the news, such as XML (and its many offspring). And there are standards development organizations, like the W3C, that enjoy a high profile in part because of the importance of the technical domains that they serve. Some standards have taken on socio-political significance, becoming pawns in international diplomacy, such as the root domains of the Internet, despite the fact that they are insignificant in size and design.
But there are other standards that go largely unheralded, and are developed by consortia that are virtually never in the news, despite the vast social and significance of the standard in question. Perhaps chief among them is the Unicode, created and constantly extended by the Unicode Consortium, whose loyal and widely distributed team of contributors largely labor quietly in the background of information technology.
Notwithstanding the low profile of the Unicode and its creators, it is this standard that enables nearly all those living in the world today to communicate with each other in their native language character sets. It even permits the words of many that lived in the past to become accessible in electronic form and in their original character sets as well.
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