Is the Unicode Standard "The foundation for all modern software and communications around the world"?

[Jonathan Rosenne via Unicode]

As a user of bidirectional text when I think of our world before Unicode and the situation today I cannot but wholeheartedly agree.



Without Unicode, few international vendors, major and in particular minor ones, would have considered implementing Hebrew in their products. Now we have everything (good things and not so good too).



Best Regards,



Jonathan Rosenne



-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of James Kass via Unicode
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 10:03 PM
To: unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Re: Is the Unicode Standard "The foundation for all modern software and communications around the world"?





On 2019-11-19 6:59 PM, Costello, Roger L. via Unicode wrote:

> Today I received an email from the Unicode organization. The email said this: (italics and yellow highlighting are mine)

>

> The Unicode Standard is the foundation for all modern software and communications around the world, including all modern operating systems, browsers, laptops, and smart phones-plus the Internet and Web (URLs, HTML, XML, CSS, JSON, etc.).

>

> That is a remarkable statement! But is it entirely true? Isn't it assuming that everything is text? What about binary information such as JPEG, GIF, MPEG, WAV; those are pretty core items to the Web, right? The Unicode Standard is silent about them, right? Isn't the above quote a bit misleading?

>

A bit, perhaps.  But think of it as a press release.



The statement smacks of hyperbole at first blush, but "foundation" can

mean basis or starting point.  File names (and URLs) of *.WAV, *.MPG,

etc. are stored and exchanged via Unicode.  Likewise, the tags

(metadata) for audio/video files are stored (and displayed) via

Unicode.  So fields such as Title, Artist, Comments/Notes, Release Date,

Label, Composer, and so forth aren't limited to ASCII data.


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