What? Using tables doesn't give you the app any faster than leaving it in unstyled divs. Additionally it makes it harder later on when you do want to reorder the blocks, and it slows down rendering time.

And indeed, without knowing the encoding there isn't much you can do with a string. You can't even find the first character in it without knowing the encoding. You can't even uppercase it or lowercase it. You can't reverse it (but then again who does, honestly...)

If a language is going to remove the need to think about encodings, the best way for it to go about it is to expose everything as unicode characters in the first place. Java is half way there but even a String in Java may have a length() different from the count of code points in the string. :-/