Simon perfectly captures my feeling when reading the various attempts to explain Unicode (most recently Joel’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode) when he says:

I feel like I could lecture for an hour on code points, glyphs, ASCII, byte-order and a whole bunch of other topics. When it comes to updating my blogging system to support comments written in Japanese I’m still almost as clueless as I was before I read any of the above.