From: announcements@unicode.org
Date: Wed Jun 02 2010 - 18:26:43 CDT
Mountain View, CA, USA – June  2, 2010 – The Unicode® Consortium today 
announced the availability of the Unicode 6.0 beta. A smooth transition 
to each new version of the Unicode Standard is vital, because it is the 
foundation for all modern software and communications around the world, 
including all modern operating systems, browsers, and smartphones; 
modern web protocols (HTML, XML,...); and internationalized domain names.
Software developers and other experts are strongly encouraged to review 
the beta data files and documentation for Unicode 6.0 carefully, and to 
provide any feedback regarding errors or other issues to the Unicode 
Consortium. Software developers can also get an early start in testing 
their programs with the beta data files so they they will be ready for 
the release of Unicode 6.0 at the end of September.
A long-awaited new feature of Unicode 6.0 is the support of new 
characters for mobile phones. The emoji (pictographic) characters are in 
very widespread use, especially in Japan. They have distinct semantics, 
and are often substituted for related words. For the first time, there 
is a standard encoding for these characters that allows lossless 
interchange between different vendors. Unicode 6.0 also adds 222 new CJK 
unified ideographs in common use in China and Japan, and a number of 
other symbols and letters used by other languages.
     * See http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ for the current 
draft summary.
     * See http://unicode.org/versions/beta.html for more information 
about the beta.
About the Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, 
extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization 
standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum 
of corporations and organizations in the computer and information 
processing industry. Members are: Adobe Systems, Apple, DENIC eG, 
Google, Government of India, Government of West Bengal, IBM, Microsoft, 
Monotype Imaging, Oracle, SAP, Sybase, The University of California 
(Berkeley), The University of California (Santa Cruz), Yahoo!, plus well 
over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.
For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium.
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