Joel Spolsky talks about Unicode and Character Sets. Essential reading for non-experts such as myself.
Actually I think the problem that programmers have with character sets are that 1. they use tools that don't understand them and therefore never learn about them (Joel mentions PHP), and 2. tools that do understand character sets but that don't make charset-related issues obvious. An example of this is Apache's Xerces. Anyone who has ever spent serious time researching a weird XML parse error only to find out that the XML document they were using had the wrong charset in the header knows what I mean.
Anyway, read the article, it's worth it.
Posted by Dave at October 11, 2003 02:34 AM