"Ahem A Rivet's Shot"  wrote

| > The 'modern' way to handle extended/extra characters is UTF
|
| It is, perhaps, worth adding that the reason that this is the
| modern way is that it is the *only* encoding capable of representing
| everything unambiguously.
|

  More to the point, it's backward compatible with HTML,
where the vast majority of webpages are still effectively
ASCII, aside from the odd curly quote or space character
inserted by editor software. Anything else would have
required multi-byte characters for the ASCII range and
thus would have broken editors and webpages.

  This way we can espouse the value of multiculturalism
without changing very much. :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05