Dave Crocker writes:
7-bit netascii is a long-standing internet norm.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange encodes only
128 different characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?(_at_)[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz plus some control
characters. Millions of users need other characters.
Yes, ASCII is a standard. That doesn't mean it's adequate. It isn't.
Mail readers and news readers have to be able to display o-umlaut, for
example. Yes, this is a change from the ASCII world. The ASCII world is
obsolete.
Yes, changing software is expensive. But this is a case where huge costs
are outweighed by huge benefits. Furthermore, sensible design---settling
on Unicode instead of a mess of ad-hoc character sets, and settling on
UTF-8 instead of a mess of ad-hoc character encodings---has considerably
reduced the costs. A huge amount of software has already been upgraded.
Many users are working comfortably in Unicode environments.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago