Since we can mess around with / make art with / commit crimes with CSS here I got to thinking about the old days of pure ASCII and, you know, maybe you could get LATIN-1 working and maybe get Spanish or French rendered with the accents, but, you know, probably not. Like, if you spoke Spanish fluently and were regularly communicating in Spanish with other people using this new-fangled e-mail you might get things set up to get an ñ to show up properly, or, you know, possibly not. But if you didn't speak any Japanese whatsoever you were not going to try to configure some JIS standard and fill 10% of your hard disk with a Japanese font. But at some point when the Unicode thing started catching on I started seeing not just an occasional ç but what was probably Chinese appear on the screen as if that was just something computers could do now. Like, I never set that up, is that just on by default now? Indeed, yes, why not install megabytes of fonts for a language the user might not speak, that's negligible these days! Like, I remember how neat it was that that just started working by default at some point!
And even years later I remember not all being able to agree on LATIN-1 vs. Unicode on IRC and maybe when someone wrote some German it would look right or maybe it would not look right.
