ArmSCII or ARMSCII is a set of obsolete single-byte character encodings for the Armenian alphabet defined by Armenian national standard 166–9. ArmSCII is an acronym for Armenian Standard Code for Information Interchange, similar to ASCII for the American standard. It has been superseded by the Unicode standard. However, these encodings are not widely used because the standard was published one year after the publication of international standard ISO 10585 that defined another 7-bit encoding, from which the encoding and mapping to the UCS (Universal Coded Character Set (ISO/IEC 10646) and Unicode standards) were also derived a few years after, and there was a lack of support in the computer industry for adding ArmSCII. Encodings defined in the ArmSCII standard Very few systems support these encodings. Microsoft Windows does not support them, for example. It is usually better to use Unicode for proper interchange of Armenian text for web browsers and email, since most modern computers do not support ArmSCII by default. The following three main variants are defined: ArmSCII-7 defined in AST 34.005 is a 7-bit encoding, not containing Latin characters. ArmSCII-8 defined in AST 34.002 is an 8-bit encoding and a superset of ASCII. ArmSCII-8A defined in AST 34.002 is an alternate 8-bit encoding and also a superset of ASCII. Note that each ArmSCII encoding also has several minor variants, depending on the revision of the related Armenian standard (which was not made official before 1997, and was defined informally before that; this has caused various confusions and the mappings described below are just best practices according to the latest 1997 revision of the Armenian standard); that may change the exact mapping and usage of a few punctuation characters and symbols. None of the ArmSCII encodings have reached international approval (unlike the ISO 10585 standard, despite of the critics sent by the official Armenian standard body to ISO/DIS JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2, working on single byte-coded character sets) because all international efforts have been made since then to work with the UCS (in Unicode and ISO 10646). ArmSCII-8 is intended for use on Unix and Windows systems, and for information interchange on the WWW and by email. However, Microsoft wanted users to use Unicode and not introduce a plethora of new code pages, so it is not supported natively on Windows. It just consists in remapping ArmSCII-7 in the higher range above the standard US ASCII range. ArmSCII-8A is