A rose by any other set of bits

I always wondered what was up with character encoding and I found an excelent article that explains how different encodings work as well as their various origins. While it is geared more towards developers, It shouldn't be hard for anyone to grasp the concepts that are explained within. But, rather than rehash someone else's work, I'll just give you a link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html