Although I'll agree that Joel's article made a bigger deal out of Unicode then was needed or is true. Calling Latin-1 a "truly monumental achievement", I think falls into the same category. Latin-1 is a good language if someone in North America, South America, or Western Europe wants a program to be used only in those countries, but if a person from Asia (which includes many more countries then China), the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Eastern Europe, etc... needs to use that program it won't work. Basic thing is if you need a language other then English Unicode is the easiest option. BTW...at least in Japan, a great number of people speak and read/write passiable English

Now for my review: This article places far to much value on Unicode, being that Unicode will not translate English to Japanese or Japanese to English just display text. Also, he seems to think, or at least say, that Unicode should be used in every application on the possiblity it might be used in a non-English speaking country, see earlier sentence on why this isn't possible. Saying that it does give good information on the use of Unicode and I would recommend people who are writting International Software read it.

BTW...I started writting letters to a penpal in Japan in sixth grade and have continued that relationship in digital form using email, but in a business sense I have never needed nor used Unicode, but I might need it for Hindi(India) project, though that is put off for a long time

Updated: I may have to use Unicode at work after all