The encoding of Chinese characters has certain significance for their proper display on those non-Chinese platforms. 

The most common encoding types are as follows

Of course, both of these two character sets can be in Unicode format (UTF-8)

When viewing Chinese web pages, it’s especially important to choose the correct coding type. This is usually automatically taken care of by your IE browser. However, when you see a lot of messy strokes on your screen, you may need to try to switch your character coding option.