This is how every character encoding ever has always worked. Text on computers — text over telegraph lines, even! — has always, implicitly, been a set of abstra

This is how every character encoding ever has always worked. Text on computers — text over telegraph lines, even! — has always, implicitly, been a set of abstract standardized semiotic codels, with effectively-arbitrary per-OS/per-machine/per-font-family/per-style/per-size(!) graphical renditions. > Unicode has set itself an absurdly impossible task. Again: "Unicode" is not the problem here. "Human language" is the "absurdly impossible task", and has been, from ~40,000BCE. Unicode is just a formalist lens through which the scope of the task is made legible. (And I think you're being a slight bit scope-insensitive here. You should expect a project like "encoding all of human language" to be something that takes hundreds or thousands of years to get right. Unicode isn't a project, it's a megaproject, something that'll still be evolving fifteen human generations from now. But humanity as a whole has built many successful megaprojects! In the only-50-years-old realm of software engineering, we don't tend to rate things of this scope and scale as "possible" or "practical" or "tenable" — but Unicode fundamentally isn't a software engineering project; it's a language engineering project, like the project of the Académie Française, or of the creation of Simplified Chinese. Language engineering is, by definition, a project of indefinite length.)