![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/8a47722ec9cfd9702f7abefaefa22482.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
[Martin v. Löwis]
I'm personally quite unhappy with iso-8859-15: it was invented at a time when Unicode was already there, and the world didn't really need any more character sets.
And there is also these MES charsets, too. I did not monitor them closely, but they are surely going to reach us one of these days... While many people see new 8-bit charsets as unwelcome, they fill a need. Unicode bears with it a few myths (simplicity, orthogonality, universality) which attract people at first, and which are also fed by incomplete or naive implementations, and fanatic proponents. But deeper one dives, deeper one realises that Unicode is quite complex after all, and the origin of a new lucrative industry where only Unicode specialists have a privileged niche. In real practice, many see that Unicode is not so democratic. The handling of strings is fundamental in computer science, nations invent new _simple_ character sets as a way of not loosing control of their own national computer industries over foreign specialists for artificial complexity. My usual explanations are fantasies. Supposing UTF-8 is not coincident with ASCII for U0000-U007F, imagine how Americans would react is asked to give up using ASCII. Another simple fantasy: supposing Microsoft did not push for Unicode, try figuring a place on this planet where Unicode would be prominent or prevailing today. It does not take a lot of Zen meditation to see that Unicode might be perceived in some foreign countries as an American threat to the local autonomy, as far as computers as concerned. Do you feel like fantasising further? Imagine that Americans (this holds for French, German, Vietnamese, and all those who got a special treat in Unicode with pre-combined characters) were asked that _some_ letters in their alphabet be only representable by combinable sequences, so Americans are now stuck all over with a variable number of bits per English character. Do you think Unicode would stand _any_ chance of ever being accepted in America? (or France, Germany, etc.) Such thoughts might help us understand why 8-bits characters are still going to multiply on this planet. -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard