Before Unicode, everyone who came up with a character encoding scheme probably thought their system was good enough for any reasonable use-case. But they all ha

Before Unicode, everyone who came up with a character encoding scheme probably thought their system was good enough for any reasonable use-case. But they all had limitations that made them inadequate for things less obscure than representing some dead Mongolian language. It would be nice if we could come up with some magical system that optimally encodes all the text that "matters" and ignores everything else, but history has shown that to be very hard. So we're left with Unicode, which takes the approach of giving us (effectively) infinite code points to represent characters, with (effectively) infinite ways to visually represent them. That does lead to a bunch of "unnecessary" baggage and headaches, but it also solves a bunch of real problems that you probably don't know exist. Unicode is a pain in the ass, but it's a solution to a very hard problem. You can feel free to design your own solution, but you'll probably run head-first into all the problems Unicode was trying to solve from 40 years ago.