It is not true that unicode never was an encoding.  It was originally a fixed-width 16-bit encoding[1].  This was arguably no longer true in the early &#x27;90s and definitely not true by 1996.<p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicode.org&#x2F;history&#x2F;unicode88.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicode.org&#x2F;history&#x2F;unicode88.pdf</a>