Computers are made to do things. The most secure computer is an unpluged computer but that would be a useless computer.
What is the alternative here? Not supporting non-ascii chars?
What is the alternative here? Not supporting non-ascii chars?
E.g. for Finland .fi could do fine with just allowing ASCII + ä, ö, å.
In that case, you won’t have roundtrip conversions with any legacy encoding beyond Latin. For example, every legacy Cyrillic encoding treats the Latin A and the Cyrillic А as different letters. (Lest you try some sort of context-sensitive transform, both are in use as single-letter word: a French verb form and a Russian conjunction, respectively.)
Even if we could deal with that, the Cyrillic letter that is written as д (pronounced [d]) when used in printed Russian is written exactly like a Latin single-storey g when used in Bulgarian (never as a double-storey one). This is a problem for your idea even in vacuum, but every legacy encoding also treats this as a mere font difference.
As a further example, a and ɑ denote different sounds in the IPA (present simultaneously in French), yet there are fonts where the former looks like the latter (this is frequent in italics, but e.g. regular Futura and Andika do that as well). Those fonts are unsuitable for IPA, of course, but that shouldn’t mean a universal encoding must be unsuitable for it as well. Then there’s the Greek α, which is definitely not an a but kind of like an ɑ.
Do you want to distinguish the German Eszett ß (sometimes has a small protrusion on the left due to its origin as a ligature of long S + S/Z) and the Greek β (never has one)? The Greek τ, the Cyrillic т, the Latin m (used as the standard shape for т in Bulgarian), and the Latin(!) m-overbar (used as the standard shape for т in Serbian)?
I guess what I’m getting at is that the equivalence classes under “some language’s writing tradition has a glyph for C1 that is very similar to some other language’s writing tradition glyph for C2” end up much larger than anyone would ever want for general text-on-computers use.
But I have a strong bad feeling what's here already is going to remain here for the foreseaable future and the best we're gonna get is better handling rather than large changes to unicode itself.