I participated to the design of Kermit multinational 8-bit
characters support and the TCP/IP network I work for is well on the way
towards the the same theory that every character on the communication
line is ISO 8859-1.
I quite agree with you. In Europe and in US, it is too much true.
Now that the international character code ISO 10646 is out, isn't it time
for communication systems to be able to not only exchange pictures and sound
but also plain text? Will ISO 10646 be used by OSI 6?
The problem is that, from the view point outside of Europe and US, ISO
10646 is merely a poor extension to ISO 8859-1.
It assignes a single code point to different but similar characters
in Japan and China.
So, please don't say "international" when what you mean is merely
"intereuropean".
Masataka Ohta