Unicode
Unicode is a standard, promoted by the Unicode Consortium, for encoding the text of most of the world's writing systems, using variable-width encodings, such as UTF-8. Its goal is to replace current and previous character encoding standards with one worldwide standard for all languages. It has already done that to a large degree; for example, it is dominant on the web, in the form of the UTF-8 encoding. UTF-16 is also common, for example, on Windows, while Microsoft recommends UTF-8. The standard supports emojis and other symbols that older standards did not support.