I remember around 10 years, I got so many problems on encoding when I read the chinese website. Whether it was simplified chinese(GB) or traditional chinese (BIG5). Sometimes, the website did not put the encoding setting in their HTML. So, a lot of times, I found the website was in non-readable. I needed to switch the encoding setting of my browser frequently.
For recently, most of webesites switched to Unicode, my problem is solved. According to Google, there are nearing 50% of website using Unicode now. That is good, I hope there will be 100% very soon. As a result, the encoding will be gone. Becuase Unicode is nearly including the characters from most of languages in the World.
Related Link:
Offical Google Blog
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Looks like really need stuff.
This is a type of unicode.
This is the information from Wikipedia about Unicode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode