Welcome to this second post in this series on UNICODE, Character sets and what have you not. In the first of these posts, I went through some of the history of character set support, and some anomalies, and finished around the mid-1990's, when we had a bunch of reasonably well stanardized 8-bit character set. And then something happens...

Jacques Chirac becomes president of France. Now wait, that wasn't it. No, what happened was the Internet, and suddenly the time of IT as isolated islands, where we could determine ourselves how we wanted our computers to operate and what character set to use. came to an end. Suddenly, a user in France could view a webpage created in Japan. And now the issue woith Character sets becomes a real problem. Luckily, stuff has been going on since the late 1980's, more specifically …