[huhlig]

This just leads me to believe that Node and it's followers never learned the lessons from their stint with php.

Also, "Encoding is the process of squashing the graphics you see on screen, say, 世 - into actual bytes." No it's a way of representing one value in a way a system can more easily handle in a hopefully lossless fashion. Encoding has nothing to do with what's on screen other than that being one representation of the data.