In earlier times, countries developed their own character sets due to their different languages used, such as Kanji JIS codes (e.g. Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, etc.) for Japanese, Big5 for traditional Chinese, and KOI8-R for Russian. However, Unicode gradually became most acceptable character set for its universal language support.

If a character set is used incorrectly (For example, Unicode for an article encoded in Big5), you may see nothing but broken characters, which are called Mojibake .