Family trees and Unicode

This is about an experience with internationalization and Unicode I’ve had recently.

My uncle has our family tree in an old version of Family Tree Maker (FTM). I figured family trees should be on the Net, like Google Documents, because they are common to so many people. A quick search revealed the existence of at least three family tree hosting sites. However, our tree is in Russian, in an 8-bit character encoding, so I had to take care of i18n.

Of the three sites, two used the Latin-1 character set, and so wouldn’t show Russian at all.