Unicode

On the subject of what you know that just ain't so, text. It ain't all ASCII anymore. ASCII is almost 60 years old stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". It's great for American English, but Unicode is a thing and it's here to stay. Any time you deal with (or ever hope to deal with) international users you need to speak Unicode. Here's a quick primer. It's 15 years old, but AFAIK everything said is still true