I'd really rather go back to the old way when there were lots of competing national encodings for each language, and the actual users of that language could vote with their web pages/documents for which one they preferred. Instead we have this one overarching encoding whose subparts were fixed for all time by fiat from committees <i>before</i> being put into practical use, and as you might expect, some of those committees really screwed things up.<p>For example, some <i>fine upstanding gentlemen</i> decided that in Unicode (and GB-18030), Mongolian ᠣ and ᠤ, which are printed/handwritten exactly the same, shall be two "different letters" U+1823 and U+1824, but the different forms of ᠳ are the "same letter" U+1833. (And of course, there's ᡩ U+1869 which <i>looks</i> like what you want for some forms of U+1833, but you're not supposed to use it because it's "only for Xibe").<p>The closest analogy I can give in English is an encoding which forced you to use different "a" codepoints for the characters in apple vs. fake because of their different pronunciations, while making a single codepoint for "k"  and "ck" and "c" (but only sometimes) because they sound the same. If you ever saw an encoding like that, you'd no doubt say to yourself: "WTF? I'm not using this, I'll stick with ASCII/EBCDIC/Morse code, thank you very much".