One of the fundamental challenges to software localization and Web site globalization is the chaotic character of character encoding. A graphic artist once gave me an explanation for the chaos that pre-dates computers. In the beginning, she said, lettering and then typefaces were the province of artists gifted in the art of calligraphy and jealous of the unique character of their characters. Craft, artistry and originality counted, not replication, which requires organization, classification, standardization, and communication and adoption of the standard. Every technological innovation since the printing press has encouraged the latter.
Some atavistic chaos endures.
Dr. Peter L. Noerr, Technical Director, Information Management and Engineering Ltd. offers a succinct and understandable overviews of character set development . Beyond certain accents or a few non-English characters, these standards could not easily accommodate languages other than English. Duplicative encoding, i.e., assigning the same encoding to two different characters or two encodings to the same character, can wreak havoc in a multilingual setting. This drawback limits ANSI to a single-language environment and makes such transfer problematic. Beyond the transfer issue, documents that contain more than one language can be a veritable nightmare to manage.