Jonathon Delacour has a post over on his site that tries to make a case that there is no such thing as plain text.

I wish Joel Spolsky had published his excellent introduction to Unicode and character encoding a week earlier, because then I wouldn’t have wasted a couple of hours trying to write a snippet of PHP code to convert Japanese characters to Unicode character entities.

When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.

That statement knocked me for a six.

He goes on to talk more about the rewrite of the PHP core by Zeev and Andi ("If anyone would be sensitive to language and character set issues, you’d surely expect it to be these guys and their colleagues."), and some of the hostility that has arrisen around this issue, growing larger and larger all the time. He does, however, make an update on the matter, stating that sites using UTF-8 haven't had issues with people reading the Unicode characters, but that there still just isn't good built-in support in PHP...