Mark Davis, President of the Unicode Board of Directors, announced the 'final version' release of The Unicode Standard, Version 3.1. The primary feature of Unicode 3.1 is the addition of 44,946 new encoded characters. Together with the 49,194 already existing characters in Unicode 3.0, that comes to a grand total of 94,140 encoded characters in Unicode 3.1. The new characters cover several historic scripts, several sets of symbols, and a very large collection of additional CJK ideographs. Unicode 3.1 also features new character properties, and assignments of property values for the much expanded repertoire of characters. All errata and corrigenda to Unicode 3.0 and Unicode 3.0.1 are included in this specification, together with significant enhancements of the Unicode conformance clauses and additions to other sections of the standard. The base documentation for Unicode 3.1 can be found online at the Unicode web site."

Bibliographic information: Unicode 3.1. "UAX #27: Unicode 3.1. [Unicode Version 3.1.0.]" By Mark Davis, Michael Everson, Asmus Freytag, John H. Jenkins and other members of the editorial committee. Published as Unicode Standard Annex #27, http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr27/tr27-3.html. Latest version URL: http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr27.

Martin Duerst (W3C) noted the relevance to W3C XML Schema [WRT the official announcement of Unicode Version 3.1]: "This means that the following clause in the 'Status of this Document' of the XML Schema Proposed Recommendation gets activated: Implementors should note that this part of this specification makes a normative reference to the current version of the Unicode Database, which specifies properties for characters on which the regular expression language defined here relies. A new version of the Unicode Database is expected to appear between the time this Proposed Recommendation is published and the time it becomes a W3C Recommendation; it is expected that the normative reference to the Unicode Database will be updated accordingly.