">These are less JavaScript problems than utf-16 problems" The issues related to combining marks are not UTF-16 problems and are not solved by converting to co

">These are less JavaScript problems than utf-16 problems" The issues related to combining marks are not UTF-16 problems and are not solved by converting to codepoints. Also, Java as well as many other UTF-16 based languages have much better unicode support than JavaScript (like access to codepoints and unicode character classes in regular expressions). As always, if something can be done in a sloppy broken way JavaScript will take advantage of it to the fullest.