Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is ASCII or Latin-1 somehow not an obscure encoding scheme by your parlance? Latin-1 is less common by quite a bit on the web than UTF-8, and ASCII might be if UTF-8 wasn't a superset. Fact of the matter is people have to get out of the habit of going "oh, that will never be relevant for me", because a) that's unlikely to be true for everybody (for example in a server environment you can't even write perfectly go…
>I know of a man whose first name is Þórr who outright >refuses to deal with any organization that will not let him >write his name, and I have a hard time disagreeing with him. How does he fly? All flights I've ever been on have required me to ASCII-fy my name.
He mentioned being somewhat forgiving when people invariably screwed it up to 'rr' or 'orr', but I think he was Norwegian. So this may be a much more common problem with accepted solutions in his area of Europe. What drove him up the wall was when he typed his name in and the web site would be all "illegal characters in name".