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