Dear software people,
Unicode is older now than ASCII was when Unicode was introduced. It’s not a weird new fad.
It’s complicated but so is the domain it represents. We recognize that we have to think about time zones and leap days and seconds, for instance. And it’s a cleaner abstraction when you aren’t halfhearted about it.
Sincerely,
Charlie
It's way more messy for CJK due to Han unification: given that you actually want to draw the "same" pictogram differently across different languages, you need to pick a font depending on the language. :(