@gaditb some sort of character set unification / standardization was inevitable (or more accurately, was inevitable if computers and the internet working more or less as they do is taken as a given) but that its implementation would look even remotely like unicodes was very much not
@Satsuma @gaditb inevitable regardless given academia i think. just to create a corpus of every text published in China you probably already need a character set which can handle at least Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, and Han characters, and now imagine a paper on that corpus written in Georgian