W3C Architecture Domain International Home Page

Questions & Answers: Who Uses Unicode?

Question

What corporate Web sites are using Unicode right now?

Background

It it sometimes assumed that Unicode is a popular encoding "behind the scenes" but rarely used on the home pages of major corporate Web sites. While most major corporate Web sites have yet to adopt Unicode as their default encodings, there are signs of change.

Answer

The home pages of the following Web sites all currently use Unicode:

To find out if a Web page is using Unicode, simply select the "encoding" feature of your Web browser, as shown below (using Internet Explorer):

By the way...

Many more companies do rely on Unicode "behind the scenes" -- that is, within their content databases. For example, a content database may hold all text in Unicode format; when the content is pulled to the Web server, it is transcoded into the native encoding.

Further Information

Following are links to related W3C content:


Contributed by Phil Arko, Siemens.

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