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Intended audience: XHTML/HTML coders (using editors or scripting), script developers (PHP, JSP, etc.), Web project managers, and anyone who is wondering whether they should use Unicode.
Are corporate Web sites using Unicode right now?
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 many major corporate Web sites have yet to adopt Unicode as their default encodings, there are signs of change.
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):
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.
You can add a logo to your page provided by the Unicode Consortium if it validates as UTF-8 using the W3C validator.
Tell us what you think (English).
Content first published 2003-07-31. Last substantive update 2004-12-08 20:42 GMT. This version 2006-11-19 00:48 GMT
For the history of document changes, search for qa-who-uses-unicode in the i18n blog.
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