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128 character US-ASCII is indeed fundamental. It is an almost verbatim translation from the teletypewriter command set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

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In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger.

Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name" after filling in a form.

Plenty of cultures are myopic: I know some folks who lived in Korea for a while who would complain about web sites that only allowed four characters. Most family names are 1-2 Hangul characters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames

And most given names are 1-2 Hangul characters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names

Why would ever need more? /s

My pet peeve is sites not accepting e-mail addresses with sub-addressing, i.e., the "tag" in foo+tag@example.com.

US-ASCII predates the internet, UNIX, WWW and almost anything else you currently use. While seminal, it was certainly not prescient. Now it is little more than a fun artifact to play around with: https://every.sdf.org/

US-ASCII predates those things in the US. In most other places, different alphabets predated ASCII, and indeed the US. Sort-of-old is no argument for quality or fitness for every purpose.

This is not about alphabets or character sets. It is about the first standardized computer-to-computer textual protocol. And that is US-ASCII. That it is all skewed to US characters is a derivative of where it was initially developed. But not to worry, zillions of other code pages for every language on the planet soon appeared, and yours probably included...

I don't disagree that it was the first computer text protocol, I disagree that "128 character US-ASCII is fundamental" nowadays, or (from article) "ASCII text remains the universal interface", or "Use only plain ASCII text. (...) The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine."

This is incredibly Anglo-centric and just plain wrong. It works fine as long as your colleagues are all named James, John, or Mike, but breaks down immediately once you meet a Françoise, Rémi, Cláudio, etc.

Even the IETF's RFCs, arguably the most popular plain-text documents on the internet, explicitly allows non-ASCII characters. Because the internet is global and unicode exists.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7997.txt

What's wrong with using UTF-8? Disregarding that I may want to write documents in a language that needs non-ASCII characters, I may want to use names of people or places that use non-ASCII characters.

The first 128 characters of Unicode (UTF-8) correspond one-to-one with US-ASCII...

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