OpenSourceArmenia

That's what I was saying in my 8-bit message.

(1) Unicode in general is not practical for communication. It is well suited for internal representation of texts in operating systems and some applications such like word processors and web browsers. But as soon as you send your text out of your operating system (e.g. send an email message or publish a web site) 8-bit encodings are simpler and more practical, except, of course, some very rare situations when you need to have more than one language on one page (not counting English).

Besides, I doubt I can read Unicode messages in the pine program or web pages in my lynx browser, for example. Do UNIX consoles support Unicode? I dunno. Most likely, they don't. And there are some other problems, too... Well, not this time.

(2) The Armenian block in Unicode is flawed. It doesn't provide one-to-one translation from/to 8-bit encodings since it lacks some of the symbols. Also, mappings of Armenian punctuation marks in Unicode are odd.

This is a complicated issue, really. It is far not obvious whether Unicode is that good in general and for Armenian in particular. I usually stick with 8-bit and use ISO 8859 series of encodings in my programs and I've never seen anything that can not be implemented that way.

So Unicode is still a questionable thing, despite the fact that Microsoft promised some 5 years ago that Unicode will be the ONLY encoding by the year 2000. What a prophecy! Though, again, the benefits of using Unicode in some specific tasks are obvious to me, too.

(Dear admin_jr, is it possible to somehow receive notifications about new additions in these forums?)