The author doesn't seem to understand the difference between an encoding and a character set. We already have a character set that denotes any possible character in the universe: Unicode. We also have several encodings that allow us to reference each of the characters in the set, the most well-known of which is UTF-8. However, UTF-8 is optimized for the Western code points, which is why alternate encodings exist. Moreover, there is all kinds of data in legacy encodings that we want to work with. Encodings are hard, but you can't go shopping without '?' showing up in your apps.