On 2019-11-19 6:59 PM, Costello, Roger L. via Unicode wrote:
Today I received an email from the Unicode organization. The email said this:
(italics and yellow highlighting are mine)
The Unicode Standard is the foundation for all modern software and
communications around the world, including all modern operating systems,
browsers, laptops, and smart phones-plus the Internet and Web (URLs, HTML, XML,
CSS, JSON, etc.).
That is a remarkable statement! But is it entirely true? Isn't it assuming that
everything is text? What about binary information such as JPEG, GIF, MPEG, WAV;
those are pretty core items to the Web, right? The Unicode Standard is silent
about them, right? Isn't the above quote a bit misleading?
A bit, perhaps. But think of it as a press release.
The statement smacks of hyperbole at first blush, but "foundation" can
mean basis or starting point. File names (and URLs) of *.WAV, *.MPG,
etc. are stored and exchanged via Unicode. Likewise, the tags
(metadata) for audio/video files are stored (and displayed) via
Unicode. So fields such as Title, Artist, Comments/Notes, Release Date,
Label, Composer, and so forth aren't limited to ASCII data.
