The Unicode Technical Committee and the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Internationalization Working Group jointly issued a technical report Friday that clarifies areas of conflict between the two standards

The different approaches to adding relevance and functionality to documents -- character encoding in Unicode and markup in XML (Extensible Markup Language) -- were beginning to overlap in some areas, and the two organizations have stated their keenness to iron out any areas of conflict. Unicode defines a 65,536-character set which holds all the letters used in alphabets and syllabaries worldwide, radical characters used in logographic (pictorial) languages such as Chinese and diacritical markers used in many scripts to mark vowels or voice tones. But it also includes many characters which define the direction which text runs in, such as from right to left as in Arabic scripts or from top to bottom as in Japanese, paragraph separation codes and ways to deal with odd items such as fractions and superscripts. It is mainly in these areas where Unicode and XML have begun to grate against one another. The two organizations have decided that markup, as used in XML, is generally more robust and functional than Unicode's character encoding for matters not strictly related to producing exotic characters.