We're at the point that it might make sense to map languages to a digital format rather than map an extensible digital format to myriad different languages. I m

We're at the point that it might make sense to map languages to a digital format rather than map an extensible digital format to myriad different languages. I mean, it will never happen, but if we had a much simpler format than Unicode that just supported a number of characters, but no combining characters, no accents (and perhaps even no case), and let each language decide how they wanted to represent themselves within that medium (are accents important enough to require a separate character, or is leaving it off or just using two characters next to each other sufficient?). That isn't to say we wouldn't want accurate representations of languages (as Unicode makes an attempt to do), but there's a difference between trying to represent a language, and trying to represent the data within a language. In some cases, the former is important, in others, the latter vastly outweighs the former, and making that easily accessible, categorized, compared, etc has value. I think it's only even conceivable at this point because of how much communication is done online, and in abridged form. We've already adopted pidgin languages for ad-hoc communication (as in IMs, SMS, and tweets), so I don't think people would find this that hard to grapple with at this point.