of the end of a line or a document. This is where most of the incompatibilities arise; MacOS uses a carriage return to mark the end of a line, Unix uses a line feed and DOS, Windows and OS/2 use a carriage and line feed. 16 At this point ASCII is not only the most widely deployed representation of text but its most durable. In the interest of interoperability, information exchange on the Internet relies on it almost exclusively. However, the Internet reaches communities all over the world. If it is to become a significant cultural force, the needs of languages using non-ASCII character sets will eventually have to be addressed. At the moment the development of a new character coding system by Xerox (with even more codeable characters) known as Unicode appears to have the support of many of the major computer players. The The Unicode Standard 17 uses a 16-bit code set that provides codes or more than 65,000 characters. Nevertheless, the decisions made by a currently dominant company, like Microsoft, show us that standards can be sacrificed to the maintenance of market share. The persistence of the QWERTY keyboard layout is further evidence that rationality does not always prevail. 6. Markup - digital wrapping paper Just as the development of the Elizabethan printing press led to variations in text that sparked 400 years of Shakespearean textual scholarship, so the evolution of character coding may well provide the digital archaeologists with years of employment. Electronic texts 18 have