For people who want to hear more on this subject I gave a talk for Papers We Love Seattle on UTF-8, its origins and evolution, and how it compares against other

For people who want to hear more on this subject I gave a talk for Papers We Love Seattle on UTF-8, its origins and evolution, and how it compares against other encodings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvaeHoIE24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvaeHoIE24 "Smiling Cat Face With Heart Eyes Emoji" plays a major role. :) It doesn't cover the same ground as this wonderful post with its study of variation selectors and skin-tone modifiers, but it provides the prerequisites leading up to it. > UTF-16 is an abomination that is largely Microsoft's fault I think that's unfair. The problem lies more in the conceptualization of "Unicode" in the late 1980s as a two-byte fixed-width encoding whose 65k-sized code space would be enough for the characters of all the world's living languages. (I cover that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvaeHoIE24&t=7m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvaeHoIE24&t=7m10s ) It turns out that we needed more space, and if Asian countries had had more say from the start, it would have been obvious earlier that a problem existed.