But what would be the cure?

1. Stop pretending that unicode is 'forwards compatible' from ASCII.

   The least useful property of unicode is that a trivial subset of it can appear to be 'simple text'.

2. Stop pretending that unicode isn't a binary format.

   Every other binary format in common use, self-identifies through the use of 'signatures'. Eg. "GIF87a" & "GIF89a".

3. Recognise that unicode isn't a single format, but many formats all lumped together in a confused and confusing mess.

   Some parts have several names, some of which are deprecated. Other associated terms have meant, and in some cases still do mean, two or more different things.

4. Recognise that there is no need and no real benefit to the "clever" variable length encoding used by some of the formats.

   It creates far more problems than it fixes; and is the archetypal 'premature optimisation' that has long since outlived its benefit or purpose.

5. Keep the good stuff -- the identification and standardisation of glyphs, graphemes and code points -- and rationalise the formats to a single, fixed-width, self-identifying format.

   Just imagine how much simpler, safer, and more efficient it would be if you could read the first few bytes of a file and *know* what it contains.

   Imagine how much more efficient it would be if to read the 10 characters starting at the 1073741823th character of a file, you simply did (say):

   seek FH, 1073741823 * 3 + SIG_SIZE, 0;
   read( FH, $in, 10 * 3 );
   [download]

   Instead of having to a) guess the encoding; b) read all the bytes from the beginning counting characters as you go.

   Imagine all the other examples of stupid guesswork and inefficiency that I could have used.

   Imagine not having to deal with any of them.

Imagine that programmers said "enough is enough"; give us a simple, single, sane, self-describing format for encoding the world's data.