Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

Some computing economics history: I'm an engineer and scientist by both education and experience, and one major difference between the disciplines is that engineers are required to pass coursework and demonstrate proficiency in economics. That's because we need to deliver things that actually do what customers think they paid for within strict budgets and schedules, or we go hungry. Scientists, on the other hand, if they can accurately predict what it will cost to prove a theory, aren't practicing science, because they have to already know the outcome and are taking no risk. A theoretically "superior" encoding may not see practical use by a significant number of people because of legacy inertia that often makes no sense, but is rooted in cultural, sociological, emotional, and other factors, including economics. Dvorak computer keyboards are allegedly far more efficient speed/accuracy-wise than QWERTY computer keyboards, so they should rule the computing world, but they don't. Keyboards that reduce the risk of repetitive stress injuries (e.g., carpal tunnel syndrome) should dominate the market for very sensible health reasons, but they don't, either. Legacy inertia is a beyotch to overcome, especially when international-level manufacturers and investors have a strong interest making lots of money from the status quo. Logic and reasoning are simply nowhere near enough to create the conditions necessary for widespread adoption - sometimes it's just good luck in timing (or, bad luck, as the case may be). ASCII was developed in an age when Teletypes and similar devices were the only textual I/O options, with fixed-width/size/style typefaces (font family is an attribute of a typeface - there's no such thing as a "font"). By the late 1950s, there were around 250 computer manufacturers, and none of their products were interoperable in any form. Until the IBM 360 was released in 1965, IBM had 14 product _lines_ that were incompatible with each other, despite having 20,000+ very capable scientists and engineers on their payroll. You can't blame the ASCII developers for lack of foresight when no one in their right mind back then would have ever predicted we could have upwards of a trillion bytes of memory in our pockets (e.g., the Samsung Note 9), much less multi-megapixel touch displays with millions of colors, with worldwide-reaching cellular/Internet access with milliseconds of round-trip response, etc. Someone thinking that they're going to make oodles of money from some supposedly new-and-improved proprietary encoding "standard" that discards five-plus decades of legacy intellectual and economic investment, is pursuing a fool's errand. Even companies with resources at the level of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., aren't that arrogant, and they've demonstrated some pretty heavy-duty chutzpah over time. BTW, you won't be able to patent what apparently amounts to a lookup table, and even if you copyright it, it will be a simple matter of developing functionally-equivalent code that performs a translation on-the-fly. See also the clever schemes where DVD encryption keys, that had been left on an unprotected server accessible via the Internet, were transformed into prime numbers that didn't infringe on the copyrights associated with the keys. True standards are open nowadays - the days of proprietary "standards" are a couple of decades behind us - even Microsoft has been publishing the binary structure of their Office document file formats. The specification for Word, that includes everything going back to v 1.0, is humongous, and even they were having fits trying to maintain the total spec, which is reportedly why they went with XML to create the .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc., formats. That also happened to make it possible to placate governments (not to mention customers) that are looking for any hint of anti-competitive behavior, and thus also made it easier for projects such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice to flourish. Typographical bigots, who are more interested in style than content, were safely fenced off in the back rooms of publishing houses and printing plants until Apple released the hounds on an unsuspecting public. I'm actually surprised that the style purists haven't forced Smell-o-Vision technology on The Rest of Us to ensure that the musty smell of old books is part of every reading "experience" (I can't stand the current common use of that word). At least I have the software chops to transform the visual trash that passes for "style" these days into something pleasing to _my_ eyes (see what I did there with "severely-flawed" ASCII? Here's how you can do /italics/ and !bold! BTW.). Nothing frosts me more than reading text that can't be resized and auto-reflowed, especially on mobile devices with extremely limited display real estate. I'm fully able-bodied and I'm perturbed by such bad design, so, I'm pretty sure that pages that prevent pinch-zooming, and that don't allow for direct on-display text resizing/auto-reflow, violate the spirit completely, if not virtually all of the letters, of the Americans with Disabilities Act (and similar legislation outside the U.S., I imagine). Your mileage may vary, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, do not spindle, fold, or mutilate, do not expose to fire or flame, batteries not included, and all of the other legalese disclaimer garbage may apply that lawyers produce, who aren't being kept busy enough looking out for widows and orphans, which should be their full-time vocation. Soapbox hereby happily relinquished to the next blowhard ...