ASCII is a text character encoding based on the English alphabet, and was first released as a standard in 1967. It represents each character with 7 bits, although there are many 8-bit extensions of it. ASCII and its extensions have been by far the dominant way to represent text in a computer, but are now being overtaken by Unicode, which can represent many more characters. In Netica, identifiers (i.e. IDnames) are always composed only of ASCII characters, while titles and descriptions may be in Unicode.