ACM TechNews

Google: Unicode Conquers ASCII on the Web

CNet (05/05/08) Shankland, Stephen

Google senior international software architect Mark Davis claims that Unicode has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the Web. Davis says Unicode overtook ASCII, as well as Western European encoding, within 10 days in December. Google prefers Unicode-based Web sites, and when the company processes data from Web sites it converts the data into Unicode if it is not already in that standard. "The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover," Davis says. One advantage that ASCII has over Unicode is that it takes at least twice as much memory to store a Roman alphabet character in Unicode because it uses more bytes to enumerate its larger range of alphabetic symbols.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9936329-39.html?tag=blog.1

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