Unicode explained (a link)

Using Unicode is good! (that's what we've all learned from different plateforms vendors, should they be Java-oriented or Microsoft-minded).
But what the mess with Unicode/UCS-2/UTF-8/ISO/UTF-16/... is!?
If you ever wandered around trying to catch the rationale of these without getting anything consistent, rush to this link.
It could save you time, especially when dealing with XML data coming from/going to different OSes, programming languages, software frameworks.