8.2 The Unicode Character Set

• Unicode: a character set aiming to cover the characters of all the languages
• Some mappings of character sets to Unicode are available at ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/.
• References to characters:
  • Character representations of code values (e.g., ‘a’, ‘8’)
  • Decimal character references &#decimal-number; (e.g., α for Greek alpha α)
  • Hexadecimal character references &#xhexadecimal-number; (e.g., ش for Arabic sheen ش, א for Hebrew aleph א )
• Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 introduce an identical character sets, defined jointly by the Unicode consortium and the International Organization for Standardization