Comment by arp242

No one is "obsessing" over anything. Reality is there are very few cases where you can use a single 8-bit character set and not run in to problems sooner or later. Say your software is used only in Greece so you use ISO-8859-7 for Greek. That works fine, but now you want to talk to your customer Günther from Germany who has been living in Greece for the last five years, or Clément from France, or Seán from Ireland and oops, you can't.

Even plain English text can't be represented with plain ASCII (although ISO-8859-1 goes a long way).

There are some cases where just plain ASCII is okay, but there are quite few of them (and even those are somewhat controversial).

The solution is to just use UTF-8 everywhere. Or maybe UTF-16 if you really have to.