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Most of the internet is based on American English. See programming for an example. For the goal of representing American English, it works fine. Why would an

• function_seven 8y ago
  Unicode is not about the Internet. Just like ASCII or EBCDIC before it weren't about networking. The reason we use Unicode is because ASCII is very limited in its scope. It can't handle the majority of the world's languages. It can't even handle American English. No dashes, no open or close quotes, etc.
  • mises 8y ago
    Most programming is in American english too. And most people who use computers end up picking up a decent bit anyway, according to some friends from a spanish-speaking country.
    • function_seven 8y ago
      So ASCII is good enough for programming, but fails at general text, unless we resign ourselves to kludges like -- instead of – and --- instead of —. And your friends from that Spanish-speaking country do UI work right? Can’t use ASCII for that. Ñ is out the window.
      • mises 8y ago
        No, they do c.
• happytoexplain 8y ago
  If you're encoding data for a domain guaranteed to contain only US English words and US English symbols, and you're OK without the occasional non-ASCII bits in US English like diacritics in loan words, then sure. But such domains are vanishingly rare. As for your examples, "most of the internet" might still contain non-ASCII, I think, but even a little bit of the internet is still a gigantic and highly active part that's inseparable from the larger domain of "the internet". And, while the legal symbols in the syntax of a programming language might only be ASCII, programming languages must process arbitrary strings, which may be user-facing, or be in some other domain where ASCII is inadequate.
• profmonocle 8y ago
  > Most of the internet is based on American English. Emoji are rapidly becoming a staple of American English. (Edit: and apparently HN filters emoji out of posts!)