* Universality: Unicode defines a unique numerical value (code point) for every character in every known writing system. This means it can represent characters from English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, emojis, and many more.
* Extensibility: Unicode is constantly evolving and adding new characters as needed. This ensures it can keep up with the ever-growing diversity of languages and writing systems.
* Compatibility: While Unicode is the standard, there are different encoding formats (like UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32) that implement it. This allows for flexibility in terms of storage efficiency and compatibility with various systems.
Why not other encoding schemes?
* ASCII: Only represents characters from English and a few other languages.
* ISO-8859: Represents characters from various European languages, but not a complete set of characters.
* GBK: Primarily focuses on Chinese characters but lacks support for other languages.
In summary, Unicode is the most comprehensive and widely adopted encoding scheme for representing all languages. It ensures a consistent and universal way to represent characters, making it essential for global communication and data exchange.