Character SetTechnically, a character set is a group elements used to represent information. From a practical standpoint, character sets define the languages supported by applications and operating systems.
Currently, ISO-8859-1 is the preferred character set on the Internet. It contains all of the characters necessarily for supporting most European and Latin American languages. Other extensions of ISO-8859 support languages such as Arabic, Greek and Hebrew. All of these use 8 bits for representing data.
Recently, for wider portability, there has been a call for a standard that would support most of the world's languages, including Japanese and Chinese. This standard, Unicode (ISO 10646) is an extension to ISO 8859-1 using wide characters. Unicode is based on a 16-bit unit of encoding. Although Unicode offers significant advantages, it is controversial because few applications and operating systems support wide characters.