In the years before MySQL 4.1, the first MySQL version which provided a complete and good support to different character encodings, developers who needed their databases to store UTF8 encoded data used different encodings (usually latin1) for table and databases while still storing real UTF8 data inside.

While the DB and tables were, as an example latin1 encoded, inside there were actually UTF8 encoded data.

PHP is a very good programming language for creating web application. As an example Drupal is written using PHP.

Unfortunately, while already 3 years ago the PHP version 5 has been released, this version is still not yet supported by most of web hosts.

This is really bad because web developers have to stuck with PHP 4 witch is now 7 years old and obviously has few and ugly features compared to PHP 5.