Four key original design goals for Unicode :

1. To create a universal standard that covered all writing systems.
2. To use an efficient encoding that avoided mechanisms such as code page switching, shift-sequences and special states.
3. To use a uniform encoding width in which each character was encoded as a 16-bit value.
4. To create an unambiguous encoding in which any given 16-bit value always represented the same character regardless of where it occurred in the data.