Universal Character Set
The W3C Internationalisation Activity assures that web technology works in all languages, scripts, and cultures. Beginning in 2004 or 2005, Unicode gained ground and eventually in December 2007 surpassed both ASCII and Western European as the Web's most frequently used character encoding. Originally allowed resources to be identified by URI in a subset of US-ASCII. allows more characters—any character in the Universal Character Set—and now a resource can be identified by IRI in any language.