or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unicode

I used to be firmly in the camp of:

"Üñî©Ø∂£ is teh suck! ASCII 4ever!"

But that is mostly because I didn't understand it. A crash course in dealing with Unicode yesterday changed that. I've read what Joel has to say on the matter, so I had the basic understanding of it all, but you never really get it until you're up to your elbows trying to translate a bunch of Windows-1252-encoded web documents into UTF-8, in accordance with the new site's templates, all on the fly, during a huge content migration. How they ever worked in the first place is beyond me, actually. All their existing templates claim to be using iso-8859-1 as their charset. Bizarre.

Besides, it's not like I didn't want to be able to express my admiration of Dürer's work, or thank my friend Jesús for all his advice on stuff. I just couldn't be arsed to figure it out before. Sometimes, work for pay changes that.