Was wir heute tun, entscheidet,
wie die Welt morgen aussieht.
Boris Pasternak, russischer Dichter
Well... how about never needing to mess with encoding settings again?
Ever needed to display several languages on one page or site and something always came up in Giberish?
With utf-8 (a variant of Unicode) glyphs (character forms) of basically all languages can be displayed with one single encoding setting.