Reminds me of the adage that standards are nice because there are so many to choose from. Fortunately, the Unicode Standard is largely--but not completely--agr

Reminds me of the adage that standards are nice because there are so many to choose from. Fortunately, the Unicode Standard is largely--but not completely--agreed on. There's still a lot of Chinese and Cyrillic in non-Unicode encodings. But if there were a "decentralized" version of unicode (the lower case 'u' here is intentional), I'm afraid it would be the wild west. In fact I can recall a time in the early 2000s where a group I was with was trying to deal with Hindi (Devanagari) electronic text. It seemed like every website had its own encoding; no one used the ISCII standard, and only a couple websites (none in India) used Unicode. Deciphering the encodings was made even more difficult by the fact that some of them were actually stroke encodings, not character encodings--as if the letter 'd' were made of the character 'c' plus the character 'l'. Humans had to use the website's font in order to read the page, and of course it was hopeless for a computer to read it without a hand-built encoding converter. It was awful.