To clarify, I meant the finer distinctions between UTF-8 and unicode aren't as important. I wasn't advocating just using ASCII. UTF-8 just works for most things

To clarify, I meant the finer distinctions between UTF-8 and unicode aren't as important. I wasn't advocating just using ASCII. UTF-8 just works for most things. I wasn't saying character encodings and knowing how they interact isn't worthwhile. For the average western programmer, UTF-8 is generally the answer. The author of the article wants everyone to be full aware of the the significance of alternate encodings as well as how they relate to codepoints. That knowledge, while useful (and not really hard to learn in a broad sense), isn't useful for many software developers.