I am entirely convinced that unicode is what happens when everybody qualified to work on the problem thinks That ' s a great idea , you just need to think about A and solve B and . I really need to be somewhere else . Seriously , the manifold idea 1 looks nice on a blackboard but provides a lot of trouble in practice . And that the unicode consortium just claimed that a file format for unicode text , or at least a standard way to encode encodings , is outside of their area of responsibility proves in my mind that nobody at that table has ever worked with a computer . However I take solace in the fact , that the members of the unicode consortium did probably understand the error of their ways and one should imagine them profoundly unhappy with their live choices . And to make matters worse , they failed to solve the problem , unicode has still user defined code pages , sorry Private Use AreasUnicodeblock , with absolutely no guarantee what these code pages contain , that is precisely the problem of ASCII unicode was supposed to solve . It is simply wrong that ASCII could not encode arbitrary scripts , ASCII has a way to designate the second half of its characters as special characters , it just had no guarantee how they are displayed . 1 Unicode distinguishes between characters and code points , so that in principle a new encoding has a automatic translation . However , in practice it leads to the question if a given text is actually Chinese or just is Chinese because most code points are Chinese script .