Unicode was originally designed with the dream of fitting everything into 16 bits. CJK unification was a controversial measure that enabled this, by combining "

Unicode was originally designed with the dream of fitting everything into 16 bits. CJK unification was a controversial measure that enabled this, by combining "the same" characters together in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Microsoft (wchar), Sun (Java), Netscape (JS) and many others settled on a 16bit fixed width "Unicode" encoding (nowadays often labelled as UCS-2). Later it turned out that 16 bits wasn't enough anyway, but we are left with the UCS-2 mess regardless. UCS-2 and CJK unification are historical mistakes in the development of Unicode that we are stuck dealing with.