While you're enjoying this classic article (and I do re-read it every time it's posted), you may wish to also take in Tim Bray's - in my opinion equally classic

While you're enjoying this classic article (and I do re-read it every time it's posted), you may wish to also take in Tim Bray's - in my opinion equally classic - article about Unicode. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode Tim has spent more time working with bodies of text [1][2] than many of us, so his perspective is very useful and the article is thoughtful. [1] Oxford English Dictionary [2] XML committee