A new draft describing how characters should be understood on the Web has been released by the W3C Internationalization Activity. This character model is important to Canonical XML, which references it, as well as to XML work in general.

The Character Models document is a foundation on which other internationalization work can proceed, describing the relationship between characters as humans see and understand them and the representations of those characters as they are stored and processed by computers. It provides a core set of descriptions that can be used to describe other character based applications of the Web and potentially other Internet applications. Like XML 1.0, it uses Unicode and ISO10646 Universal Character Set as its basis.