What I think is that it is useful to use different character sets for different purposes. One character set cannot possibly be useful for everyone in all applic

What I think is that it is useful to use different character sets for different purposes. One character set cannot possibly be useful for everyone in all applications, even though that is what the Unicode Consortium tried to do. Unicode is just really a mess, I think. PostScript allows characters to have names instead of only numbers (you can change the assignment of numbers to each name), or you can use CID keying which means given a character set name, that decides what each 16-bit number corresponds to. Adobe said you will have to register the character set name, but I think that you can use URIs (or UUIDs, which are a special case of URIs). You could also use UUIDs as XUIDs, by using 36#UUID as the organization number, and then the next four numbers make up the UUID. I am working on a character set actually, but it isn't really decentralized nor is it meant to replace Unicode in all of its uses; it is meant only for a specific use, which is grid-based displays (such as terminal emulators). There is a 8-bit mapping, which can be used to encode text, and there is a 16-bit mapping, which can be used for fonts and for tables within terminal emulation software to convert character codes from other character sets. Additionally, it has the property that both the 8-bit and 16-bit mappings allow easily figuring out the width of a string, without needing any tables, without having any ambiguity, and without the possibility to be changed in future (you can actually just add together the widths of the bytes, which are determined using a simple rule; control codes have undefined widths). The 8-bit mapping is also compatible with principle of extended ASCII (like UTF-8 is, although the format is different from UTF-8). I have also seen someone else on IRC also mentioning making up such a character set for grid-based displays, although theirs was simpler than mine, not having any non-ASCII single width characters at all. I consider that drawback unacceptable, so I made one which is almost as simple, but allows non-ASCII single width characters. One thing that Unicode is good for though is searching collections of documents written in many languages. However, Unicode has many features which are excessive, unnecessary, or problematic, for that purpose, too. Another alternative I have seen once on IRC is Duocode, where each character code has two halfs, being the language code and the glyph code. For the purpose of searching documents in many languages, this Duocode idea might even be better than Unicode (especially if many of the messy features of Unicode are avoided). And, for Chinese writing, there is Cangjie encoding. (I think Cangjie is mostly used as a input method, although it could also be used as a character set for Chinese writing.) I also don't need emoji, I think.