Table 9–1: Unicode’s Advantages
Advantage
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Explanation
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Simplified application development
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When an application component uses Unicode, all symbols needed by the application for reading and writing character data reside in a single code page.
This simplifies application development enormously.
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Ease of migration of existing code
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UTF–8 includes the traditional ASCII characters in its first 127 positions and assigns each of these characters its traditional ASCII value.
This simplifies adapting existing ASCII applications to Unicode.
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Ease of providing shared access to data
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Progress clients that use incompatible code pages can easily read and write a single UTF–8 database.
Progress automatically converts the code page as data passes between the client and the database.
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Ease of worldwide deployment
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UTF–8 databases and r-code files are multilingual.
They can be deployed worldwide.
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Interoperability
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Active-X and Java clients are Unicode based.
They can communicate with UTF–8 databases and application servers.
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Web compatibility
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Unicode is becoming the universal code page of the Web. Current Web standards require Unicode and rely on it.
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Multilingual applications
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Applications using Unicode can support multiple languages:
- In the data
- In the user interface
- In reports
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