Buddha Buck wrote: >Do you have something against Unicode? Several things, yes, but Unicode has its uses and I'm not fundamentally opposed to it. I'm happily using it at work (developing my company's multilingual primary application), in UTF-8 form, though I unhappily have to cope with a lot of pre-existing code that doesn't handle it correctly. What prompted my mention of ASCII in this thread is that Agora Nomic is definitely not a suitable place for the use of Unicode. We've discussed this before; check the archives.
Agora participants use a wide variety of equipment and software, and all we can rely on an email user, in general, being able to process is US ASCII. A message that is expressed using non-ASCII characters would de facto not be accessible to all players. We also face all the practical problems that come from the diversity of ASCII-superset encodings. Even among those of us who can interpret non-ASCII characters in email, their presence in any game text would be a hinderance to the normal processes of official recordkeeping and the production of derivative texts. -zefram
