CJK Type Blog

I like ASCII. Do I like ASCII because of all the wonderful things one can do with its extraordinarily large repertoire of 94 printable characters? Actually, yes. Before I defend that answer, I’d like to point out that ASCII has three important strengths: simplicity, robustness, and ubiquity. In other words, ASCII is simple in that it has a relatively small number of characters; it forms a subset of virtually every encoding, Unicode or otherwise; and is supported everywhere. In fact, ASCII can be used to represent Unicode through the use of notations. Richard Ishida‘s excellent Unicode Code Converter is an excellent way to explore the various notations that are currently in use.
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