> 32 bit integers The original UTF-8 was at most 31 bits long (one bit in the leading byte, 6*5 = 30 bits in six subsequent bytes). > you'd start getting coll

> 32 bit integers The original UTF-8 was at most 31 bits long (one bit in the leading byte, 6*5 = 30 bits in six subsequent bytes). > you'd start getting collisions in the byte patterns and would lose the self-synchronising properties I'm not sure why. The main requirement for self-synchronization in this case is that the leading byte doesn't appear anywhere else, which would be the case for the leading byte FF. It would require substantial modifications to go beyond 7 bytes (say, it would have alternative means to denote the length of following data bytes) but it is surely possible.