Jeff Atwood posted a link to a site that sells T-shirts and stickers with the following image:

I am thinking of ordering some of them. Handling encodings is a very important part of programming and from my experience a lot of developers do not care enough about it. I encourage every developer to read “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” from Joel Spolsky. It describes the evolution of encodings in a very easy way.

Some months ago I wrote a post about how to deal with encodings when using Tomcat as web application container.