Unicode - 25-year update

IMDb used to have a newsletter, and the mid-April 1997 issue contained an item titled "The Great ISO Swap" reporting that IMDb had implemented the ISO 8859-1 (also known as ISO Latin-1) character set, allowing names and titles to use all the common letters with diacritical marks of the major Western European languages (such as å, ç, é, ï, ñ, ô, and ù).

http://web.archive.org/web/20060101140203/http://www.imdb.com/Newsletter/newsletter-13#iso

Near the end of the item the following statement appeared:

Ideally all data should be presented using its native character sets/ pictograms. Technically this is not possible though with current widespread software for web access, e-mail and operating systems in general.

In the future there will be a new huge standardized 16 bit character set called Unicode. It will offer the capability to freely combine Japanese Kanji with ISO 1 text and Hindi, for example. We will use it as it becomes widely available and supported by the industry.

I note that some additional character sets have been made available for the Alternate Titles section over the last few years (among them Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic), and I personally am not that affected by the lack of full Unicode support. However, I know that some contributors here would like to see further progress made in terms of implementing Unicode, so I am bringing this up to mark the 25 years since IMDb announced plans to implement it.