What's the definition of "unicode"?

[Robert Parker <Ro...@evolving.com>]

My page of choice for explaining UTF-8 encoding is
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

This indicates to me that unicode is the specification of the mapping of
integer values to "picture representations of characters" i.e. unicode
is a "code table" not a particular encoding scheme.

However on the xerces-c web pages and code, I've noticed that the
internal representation used within xerces (i.e. the array of XMLCh) is
referred to as if it were "unicode". But XMLCh is actually of typedef of
"unsigned short", so isn't XMLCh more correctly a UCS-2 encoding scheme
? (especially since unicode integer range is more than 16 bits)

?

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