Hannes,

> >   Well, most of the non-English, non-Unicode encodings are more or
> > less compatible with ASCII^^;
> 
> Hoping the following clarifies a point...

  Well, I shouldn't have written the previous one because I don't
disagree with your point; UTF-8 might become the "ASCII" of the 21st
century.

> UTF-8 is compatible not only on the encoding level (assignment of code 
> numbers), but as well on the physical level (sequence of bytes).
> Every ASCII string can be considered UTF-8 encoded already.

  Of course, this statement is also true for 'most of the non-English,
non-Unicode' encodings.  So, what I wanted to say was that this
statement and the one you wrote don't mean too much.

-- Yoshiki