Toward decent text encoding

Abstract

Text is composed of characters; we get different kinds of text from different kinds of characters. So character sets are very important. And if there are contending views about whether we are well served by our character set standards, these views should be exposed and discussed. It's strange that the computing industry has for so long stuck to poor and impoverished character sets for text encoding. Now, without much public discussion or dispute, the computing industry seems to be moving to an equally poor but contrastingly obese character set called Unicode.