Why are there multiple representations of alphabet characters in Unicode? It seems reasonable to include accent marks, but what's the benefit in having a Cyrillic 'o' alongside a standard 'o' or the 2 or 3 other ASCII-lookalike sets of characters?
Here are some contexts in which this semantic difference is important: search (compare search results for "cop" and "сор"), alphabetical sorting, text-to-speech, spellchecking, case conversion ("ATOM" -> "atom", but "АТОМ" -> "атом", note the difference between t-т and m-м).
I never rely on Unicode for computation. When receiving Unicode I always make sure it's in the ASCII range. It could be argued that there should never have been Unicode domain names but I guess Western people are very lucky that ASCII includes most of their characters...
Please don't spread the myth of Western languages being encodable in ASCII, and don't pretend to support Unicode (or anything else than English) if you filter everything to ASCII.
The _only_ Western language that is encodable in ASCII is English.
Corollary: English is the only language that can be encoded in ASCII.
The other western languages have endless issues with text being encoded/stripped down to ASCII. e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, German...
But that was not my point. The point was about identifiers, such as DNS names.
If you're transcribing a conversation at the UN and there is a mix of different languages the fact that "Het" is transcribed as a latin character set is information. Het may be a southern American group of people, or it could just be a Russian dude saying "no", even if it looks the same.
I understand that we're still burdened by intralanguage homonyms, but I appreciate the fact that it isn't complicated further.