Unicode is not the only character set (or the best one); this is a falsehood programmers believe about character sets (I wrote a list of this too but I do not remember if I had published it). However, that is not the most severe issue, due to the other things mentioned, such as if people do not have names (or if there are multiple ways to enter them, or if people sometimes change their name, or have the same name as other people, etc).
> Unicode is not the only character set (or the best one); this is a falsehood programmers believe about character sets
Unicode is the best if I want to communicate with other people. I lived through the 1990s; you won't convince me that playing "guess the encoding" with dozens of subtly-incompatible standards (and non-standards, and almost-standards) was a good time, or that having to override a web browser's helpful guess was fun.
