It's misleading to describe UTF-8 as "the most fundamental encoding", because of the existence of UTF-32 (essentially just a trivial encoding of "raw" Unicode c

It's misleading to describe UTF-8 as "the most fundamental encoding", because of the existence of UTF-32 (essentially just a trivial encoding of "raw" Unicode code points) and UTF-16 (which has certain limitations that later became part of the specification of what code points are valid in any encoding) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16#U+D800_to_U+DFFF_(surrogates) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16#U+D800_to_U+DFFF_(surro... UTF-8 is the most ubiquitous encoding on the web, but that doesn't make it more fundamental than any other.