i18n and L10n: 14 - Unicode adoption

February 1st 2010

Unicode now accounts for almost 50% of all content online

When André Schappo published this link on Twitter I was really encouraged to read about the positive uptake with Unicode (UTF-8). Nearing 50% of the web has been encoded using UTF-8 and therefore the Unicode character-set.

On the 5th May 2008, Google announced on The Official Google Blog Unicode 5.1 accounted for ~25% of all Internet content less than one month after it was released. This was a momentous achievement. Now 18 months later this figure has increased to ~47%. This 22% improvement is a fantastic success for the Unicode Consortium enabling numerous internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) projects across the web.

The advantage of Unicode is that unlike other character-sets, Unicode can represent thousands of characters for languages ranging from Arabic to Zulu and everything in between. Moving to Unicode gives developers and users the greatest flexibility to produce content in the widest range of languages.

The Unicode project will facilitates greater diversity of content and opinion on the web. Thus improving the collective knowledge of humanity as stored online. By using Unicode, we fulfil the nets libertarian founding principles offering freedom of expression to all users in which ever language they choose.

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