@gaditb@icosahedron.website the question imo is in terms of usecase keeping text in a custom encoding is very possible, and translating between encodings is very possible, especially if you allow “convert from encoding A to Unicode and convert from Unicode to encoding B” because then each encoding only needs to define Unicode mappings to be fully interchangeable (in fact i have developed some software for precisely this) but if your usecases include large amounts of multilingual text, then you probably need to support Unicode, or at least aren’t saving much by not using Unicode, at least as far as the encoding format goes (whether you buy into the full set of algorithms is another question)