Unicode has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web, Mark Davis, Google's senior international software architect, said in a blog post.

Punycode is specifically equipped to handle this, as it's a standard for representing Unicode text using ASCII characters. For example, the Chinese character “ 短 “ is represented in Punycode ...

Back in the day, American Standard Code for Information Interchange was the system for translation or encoding characters. However, ASCII was limited to the English alphabet, punctuation, and numbers.

When data is stored or transmitted, it is its ASCII or Unicode number that is used, not the character itself. For example, in binary, the word "Computer" would be represented as: ...