Life Before Unicode
Dealing with multiple code pages was terrible, ugly, impossible, and simply awful.<p>Unicode was a great salvation. Until the Unicode spec wandered off into nutburgerland:<p>1. embedding invisible semantic information into the encodings<p>2. multiple encodings that mean the same thing<p>3. moved beyond standardizing existing alphabets, and wandered into a never-ending stream of people inventing all sorts of glyphs and campaigning to get them into Unicode<p>4. set language back 2000 years by deciding that hieroglyphs were better than phonetics<p>5. conflating 𝖋𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖘 with alphabets<p>6. the crazy concept of &quot;levels&quot; of Unicode compatibility<p>all resulting in it simply being impossible to correctly support Unicode in your programs, or design a font to display Unicode.