I wish. If you live in any country that uses more than ASCII, then certainly not since forever. I mean, just for my language there were 7 different encodings (according to Wikipedia, possibly more) before Unicode era. When you want to read these it's solvable problem, but still it is extra work to deal with it. Now that we have UTF-8 as de-facto standard, it is much better, but there are still problems. Like when you use Japanese and it gets displayed as Chinese (same characters are different glyphs depending on language).