Unicode is a modern character set that does all the wonderful things that the guy says it does. But it doesn't transmit directly across the Web; the Web protocols are limited to the old 256-character ANSI.

However, there's a way around this called "escaping", special sequences to produce what the specs call "entities".

For example, you'd introduce a trademark symbol with ™; it comes out "™". There are several hundred of these entities defined. You can find a pretty good list here.

Bit o'trivia: The message board software already stores messages in Unicode. It's just the problem of getting from here to there that requires the use of escaping.