I disagree: - Ruby isn't UTF8-only, but Rails is. - Unless I'm building a site that caters to CJK languages where Han unification is unacceptable, I'm not goi

I disagree: - Ruby isn't UTF8-only, but Rails is. - Unless I'm building a site that caters to CJK languages where Han unification is unacceptable, I'm not going to need to deal with non-unicode text. In 4 years of Rails development, I never set $KCODE to anything except 'UTF8'. - Any solution to the Han unification problem is almost certainly going to happen within Unicode, or at least in some Unicode private-use area that can be encoded using UTF-8. - As a last resort, it's still easier to use something like "surrogateescape"/"UTF-8b" to pass arbitrary bytes through the system than it is to support multiple text encodings at every single place where text is handled.