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→History: Unicode is not a storage mechanism. Alos, afik, it is agnostic about storage (UCS2, UTF8, UTF16). This section needs a rewrite by someone who understands these distinctions. |
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Initially, computer systems and system programming languages did not make a distinction between [[character (computing)|character]]s and [[byte]]s: for the [[List of writing systems#Segmental script|segmental scripts]] used in most of Africa, the Americas, southern and south-east Asia, the Middle East and Europe, a character needs just one byte, but two or more bytes are needed for the [[ideographic]] sets used in the rest of the world. This subsequently led to much confusion. Microsoft software and systems prior to the [[Windows NT]] line are examples of this, because they use the OEM and ANSI code pages that do not make the distinction.
Since the late 1990s, software and systems have adopted [[Unicode]] as their preferred
|url=http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#charencoding
|title=Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 (Second Edition): Character encodings
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|archive-date=19 April 2021
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210419133700/https://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#charencoding
|url-status=live}}</ref> All current Microsoft products and [[application program interfaces]] use Unicode internally,{{cn|date=October 2020}} but some applications continue to use the default encoding{{clarify}} of the computer's 'locale' when reading and writing text data to files or standard output.{{cn|date=October 2020}} Therefore, files may still be encountered that are legible and intelligible in one part of the world but unintelligible [[mojibake]] in another.
=== UTF-8, UTF-16 ===
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