They're not arguing that the length [of the bytestream] is what the user cares most about.
I thought they covered this quite well in the "Myths" section on "counting coded characters or codepoints is important."[0]
From that section they explain that for text manipulation [e.g: cursor position & manipulation of text under the cursor] the programmer should be counting grapheme clusters; whereas for storage [memory & disk] concerns the programmer _should_ care about the number of codepoints.
They go on to say that counting the number of characters is up to the rendering engine and is completely unrelated to the number of codepoints.
I don't think the _manifesto itself_ is wildly misguided. In that section they were merely pointing out _how .NET and Java currently report string length._
At least as I read the manifesto: they seem to believe that counting codepoints is useful _but orthogonal_ to counting characters.
From that section they explain that for text manipulation [e.g: cursor position & manipulation of text under the cursor] the programmer should be counting grapheme clusters; whereas for storage [memory & disk] concerns the programmer _should_ care about the number of codepoints.
They go on to say that counting the number of characters is up to the rendering engine and is completely unrelated to the number of codepoints.
I don't think the _manifesto itself_ is wildly misguided. In that section they were merely pointing out _how .NET and Java currently report string length._
At least as I read the manifesto: they seem to believe that counting codepoints is useful _but orthogonal_ to counting characters.
[0]: http://www.utf8everywhere.org/#myth.strlen