It wasn't canned because it was a flawed design. It was canned because they couldn't make it work well enough technically. Encodings are still a total mess in P

It wasn't canned because it was a flawed design. It was canned because they couldn't make it work well enough technically. Encodings are still a total mess in PHP unless you are very careful (no runtime errors, you just run with it and maybe you'll see correct output or mojibake in the end).