>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor.
What if I speak Chinese?
What if I speak Chinese?
I agree with most of this article but, as a Spanish, German and Italian speaker, you can bet I'll refuse to write in an unnecessarily crippled and incorrect version of these languages; I'm very grateful for Unicode.
However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.
If you want an easy international language, that's why we (humans) invented many years ago the concept of international auxiliary languages, Esperanto as the oldest/most known but various others exists. That's the SOLE way to have their own mother language and a secondary language for "any nation" that does not give advantages to any nation (so far English is the global language just because they were the winner of the last big world war, before was French etc) and so can be accepted by anyone.
Remember the principle of communicating vessels, no matter the present global situation, if it's not egalitarian than sooner or later will be weaponized and things change. If really neutral and useful it might survive. The Swiss choose Latin as a symbolical neutral language, we might do something better for something less symbolic but much more important in practice...
1. Works with everyone’s language. Which ASCII does not
2. Works on pretty much every machine. Which ASCII does very well.
I’m not defending the use of pure ASCII but if you’re concern is that the text is rendered universally then ASCII wasn’t the worst suggestion a few years back.
What you’re arguing is a different requirement and that’s support for peoples languages. If that’s a concern then ASCII isn’t the right choice.
Those two requirements are not mutually inclusive.
If the article had been written 20 years before it actually was, maybe. You're making me feel old here, 2015 really was not very long ago and little of relevance to this discussion has changed between then and now.
To be clear, even in 2015 _I_ personally would have recommended Unicode (like yourself) because it was clear that it was, and is, the future. But I can forgive some people for being cautious about it even as late as 2015 if universal comparability was their concern.
My point is, if you’re only targeting English speakers _and_ you’re primary concern is portability then ASCII isn’t wasn’t unreasonable recommendation.
I speak Greek but all my notes, text, etc are in English, which also helps if i want to share them at some point with others.