Which is why UTF-16 failed To be pedantic, what failed was UCS-2, the enconding formerly known as just 'Unicode'. UTF-16 was introduced with version 2.0 of the

Which is why UTF-16 failed To be pedantic, what failed was UCS-2, the enconding formerly known as just 'Unicode'. UTF-16 was introduced with version 2.0 of the standard and can encode all codepoints thanks to the surrogate pair mechanism.