For example, a three stroke grass radical and a four stroke grass radical are each allographs. Most textual operations operate on graphemes, e.g., searching, sorting, equivalence testing, parsing, etc. Variable length encodings of graphemes are much less difficult to handle than dealing with allographic encodings. The ability of a character set to represent the core content of a written language is predicated on it being able to distinguish between the graphemes of that written language. In such cases, we can say that the character set employs variable length grapheme encodings.
Textual information is meant for more than simply display.
Optimizing the representation of text for display alone produces suboptimal behavior for many other operations. Unicode is a plain text standard. Alternatives to han unification have been proposed including a decomposition scheme based on radicals. However, any scheme that would unambiguously represent all known han characters would require more than 1200 radicals or some method for disambiguating decompositions. For each writing system there is one and only one alphabet, and that such an alphabet is comprised of the collection of symbols employed by the writing system.