Yep.  It's a huge ugly mess.  For an inkling of what's wrong, read these:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html</a><p><a href="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2643" rel="nofollow">http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2643</a> (search for "unicode")<p><a href="http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/" rel="nofollow">http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/</a>