It used to be that accented characters were a big deal of complications, and still is, to some extent. In my Fidonet days, putting any accented characters in an email was a seriously involved business, and the situation was only marginally better on the Internet.
Unicode is starting to make things much better, but certain cultures still get shafted, IMHO (for example, the cyrillic charsets used to be able to specify language with a single byte per character, but the common UTF-8 encoding will take two or three bytes per character, and the less common UTF-16 a more consistent two bytes, effectively doubling the storage used by equivalent textual data).
I am very proud to have a full Unicode font on my computer, meaning that my computer is able to display any Unicode code point (or so it claims). The korean, chinese, japanese, hebrew and russian spam that I get certainly looks a bit better than it used to, for what it's worth!
But I think that the very fact of having a global network sort of enforced a convergence, which happened to be on english. What's the point of being able to talk to anyone in the world if they won't understand you?
Unicode is starting to make things much better, but certain cultures still get shafted, IMHO (for example, the cyrillic charsets used to be able to specify language with a single byte per character, but the common UTF-8 encoding will take two or three bytes per character, and the less common UTF-16 a more consistent two bytes, effectively doubling the storage used by equivalent textual data).
I am very proud to have a full Unicode font on my computer, meaning that my computer is able to display any Unicode code point (or so it claims). The korean, chinese, japanese, hebrew and russian spam that I get certainly looks a bit better than it used to, for what it's worth!
But I think that the very fact of having a global network sort of enforced a convergence, which happened to be on english. What's the point of being able to talk to anyone in the world if they won't understand you?
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