The Structure of Unicode

This chapter is an in-depth presentation of the fundamentals of Unicode, including design principles, coding space, and special terminology. Unicode's nature as an umbrella standard based on a large number of older standards and its relationship to ISO 10646 will be described, examining both the unification principle and criticism of it. However, to divide the complexity to manageable pieces, we postpone the discussion of properties of characters (including, for example, normalization) and the Unicode encodings to the next two chapters.