Unicode – Less than 25 Years Later
Jeremias Märki, SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT&CONSULTING
Once upon a time, there was the byte. 8 bits. 256 possible numbers or characters. That is not enough by far to map all the usual characters, let alone those of other languages. And who hasn't had problems with the Euro character, yet? Unicode brought the solution in October 1991. Many have heard of it but in the Jungle of legacy systems, it is still a challenge, even after 25 years. The thing is: we basically can't afford not to tackle this.

Jeremias Märki
Jeremias Märki has been working as a freelance software developer and consultant in the world of documents for more than 14 years. His focus is on open standards (such as XML, XSL and SVG) and open source. For more than 10 years, he has worked on various open source projects and since 2004, he is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Besides professional support and development services around various open source products, he offers education services on topics like XML and XSL. He also helps companies with their projects in the area of documents and document formats.