(This is a continuation of yesterday's Text is Never ÅPlainÅ)

Why should you, the product manager, or editor, or designer, care about things like text encoding? For the simple fact that it can ruin your life. I can almost guarantee that your web site and CMS are full of frightening assumptions about text files. You know when you'll find them? When you decide it's time to present your site in another language, or you start getting content in other languages, or even English content from people using computers in other countries.

I started a version of this post about a year and a half ago, when users of a CMS tool I'd written noticed strange characters in their documents. Quotation marks were showing up as foreign letters. The legal section symbol (§) was showing up as the degree sign (°).

You've probably seen this problem yourself in email or when copying and pasting web content. The text looked fine to the person who gave it to you, but to you, it looks like garbage. Why? As one of the clients using my application asked, "It's just plain text! What's the problem?"