[rimliu]

    > Use ASCII and other character sets.

We have tried that before. It did not work, and it was not pretty. You may not know, but there is a huge demand to be able to use characters from different sets in the same document. How do you do Wikipedia without Unicode? (E.g. this: Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (English: /ˈpʊʃkɪn/;[1] Russian: Александр Сергеевич Пушкин[note 1]).

How would you implement any chat/messaging app for the international audience? Like in my current company, I am sure at least five languages, each with its own alphabet, are used to communicate in Slack.

For me, app not supporting Unicode is broken.

[bawolff]

Wikipedia didnt use unicode originally, en, da, sv, nl language wikipedia all used windows-1252. This all changed somewhere around 2004 i think, but there is still legacy code to deal with edits from before the switchover point.

I imagine the answer is, it kind of sucked but people made due the best they could with the limited allowed characters. Its not like IPA notation is a critical feature