Unicode is growing
The Internet was created by using the 7-bits ASCII character set. Over the years, the internationalisation of the Internet forced protocol designers to reconsider the utilisation of the 7-bits US-ASCII character set. A first move was the utilisation of the 8-bits character sets. Unicode became the unifying standard that allows to encode all written languages. A recent article in IEEE Spectrum provides interesting data about the progressing of Unicode on web servers. See http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/standards/will-unicode-soon-be-the-universal-code