Back in the semi-olden days, when Unix was being invented and K&R were writing The C Programming Language, everything was very simple. EBCDIC was on its way out. The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had a code for them called ASCII which was able to represent every character using a number between 32 and 127.
... all was good, assuming you were an English speaker.
Lingua francas of the Web
See Also
- JavaScript Conquered the Web. Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
- History of the World Wide Web
- Lingua franca
What can you do about it? Probably nothing. Isn't that cheery news?
I think so. In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me
over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of
people who want to -- strap yourselves in, here it comes -- control
what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX,
Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment:
"Sorry, you're screwed."
Ah well, live and learn. Or not.
— MARC ANDREESSEN (1994)
