I am old enough to remember when different charsets for different locales was the norm and Unicode was a controversial and ambitious project to create one character set to represent all languages. UTF-8, the very clever encoding format for Unicode is ubiquitous now but is actually so new the original default for web pages was the relatively parochial ISO 8859-1. Here is a very clear 37-minute tutorial on why UTF-8 and what it is, with bonus coda on the cunning way Korean Hangul script is represented in Unicode.
(Via “A number of hidden problems in the naïve approach” – Unsung)
