[mlinhares]

Did you mean english speaking countries? Because most European countries (that I would assume are part of the "West") require unicode support as names and last names include non-ASCII letters.

Also, if you work for a "regional company" in Virginia and you don't support unicode you're likely excluding 11.5% of the Latino population that do make use of non-ASCII characters in their names and Asians, that are 7% of the population. So, yes, it is a serious professional failure to do that, even in "Virginia".

[noirbot]

You're somewhat right, though I was just parroting the parent comment's example. If anything, you're pointing out what a terrible example it is. If you drop unicode support, that's not "not thinking about your immediate users", it's shipping a pretty broken product in general in a way that's easily fixable in most projects, which transcends the "is it engineering" line by a good bit.

That said, I'd be curious what percentage of people with non-English names actually require Unicode for their names. Not every Asian or Latin person, or even most of them I know, use non-ASCII characters in their name, and very few businesses or applications require you to enter a full legal name that needs to be accurate the the language used to name you. I work at a company with a large amount of international employees and I'm not sure I've seen anyone with a non-ASCII character in their name, and I'm pretty sure Active Directory and Slack support Unicode. So while it would be a mistake to not have Unicode support, I am curious how much it would actually cause an issue. It would be inconsiderate to not support it on a form, but there's plenty of businesses who could probably operate just fine with only Latin characters.

[mlinhares]

You haven't seen them because they have already been burned by stupid systems that will not take non-ASCII characters so they don't even try, the most common Spanish/Portuguese first name is José but I doubt you'll find a José at your job.

[noirbot]

Sure, but then that's a very loose meaning of "requires" unicode support if all the people who "require" it probably aren't even going to try to use it even if you support it.

Ironically, isn't part of the issue that most "engineered" keyboards in the US don't have any innate way to type those, and thus require your "programmed" OS or application to have the support needed to even type those characters with some chord of keys?

[denton-scratch]

Mos european languages can be rendered without relying on Unicode. You use character-sets. 7-bit ASCII is a fossil from an ancient era.

Of course, if you need multiple languages on the same page, it gets more complicated, and Unicode makes sense.