It's not that it's hard, it's just people don't go out of their way to escape UTF-8 glyphs into ASCII when dealing with exotic glyphs in a text editor. It's mor

It's not that it's hard, it's just people don't go out of their way to escape UTF-8 glyphs into ASCII when dealing with exotic glyphs in a text editor. It's more mundane and tedious, but not 'hard'. Try working with raw UTF-8 in JS and find yourself in a world of pain. Mathias Bynens talks about these gotchas here: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-unicode https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-unicode