Well I would say UTF-8 is a clever hack, by exploiting bit patterns rather than really having proper "code planes" to encode characters one by one. The inherent

Well I would say UTF-8 is a clever hack, by exploiting bit patterns rather than really having proper "code planes" to encode characters one by one. The inherent problem of UTF-8 is of course having wasted spaces and requires the processor to have fast bit masking operation (well although it is virtually solved in the 90s), but the advantanges of UTF-8 outweights the bad side