John;
Anyway, with the fix, there is no reason to prefer Unicode-based
local character sets, which is not widely used today, than existing
local character sets already used world wide.
Of course there is. What do you do when someone wants to combine charsets
from different nations? For example, say a Japanese man named Ohta married
a Mexican woman whose paternal surname was Col_n. Their child's full
surname, if they lived in Mexico, would be "Ohta y Col_n". If that child
wants to spell their surname correctly, they can't use a
just-European or just-Japanese character set; they probably need Unicode.
While marrying wih a Mexican woman is, if my wife and children allow,
an fascinating idea, I'm saying, with your example (actually, European and
Japanese contexts happen to be compatible, but to follow your
example, let's assume they are not), the child must say
european-local-unicode and japanese-local-unicode at the same time,
which is impossible.
Just saying "unicode" is not enough to display "Ohta y Col_n" with
japanese local unicode-based character set.
Unicode is not useful in international context.
Masataka Ohta