> dropping UTF-16 altogether (well, already, because there are plenty of extended codepoints above 0xFFFF) UTF-16 can handle stuff above U+FFFF just fine, it e

> dropping UTF-16 altogether (well, already, because there are plenty of extended codepoints above 0xFFFF) UTF-16 can handle stuff above U+FFFF just fine, it encodes that with surrogate pairs. Are you thinking about UCS-2? The 21-bit limit for Unicode comes from the limits of UTF-16's surrogate pairs.