Re:Text editing hates you too (2019)
by qsort on Friday May 21, 2021 @04:33PM
(#27239590)
Extended ASCII was actually several different and incompatible encoding, "codepages". It was kind of a solution, but there were major issues that made it much worse than Unicode/utf8:
- Asian languages needed special encodings, 256 characters weren't sufficient.
- It was impossible to work with different languages in the same document, each codepage only covered some character/alphabet.
- There was no 'safe subset': Unicode codepoints 0-127 are exactly ASCII, which means that ASCII is compliant utf8. The same wasn't true at the time.
- Asian languages needed special encodings, 256 characters weren't sufficient.
- It was impossible to work with different languages in the same document, each codepage only covered some character/alphabet.
- There was no 'safe subset': Unicode codepoints 0-127 are exactly ASCII, which means that ASCII is compliant utf8. The same wasn't true at the time.