Keep in mind UTF-8 can represent everything in Unicode without the surrogate pairs that make UTF-16 as annoying as it is. UTF-8 is inherently variable-width, b

Keep in mind UTF-8 can represent everything in Unicode without the surrogate pairs that make UTF-16 as annoying as it is. UTF-8 is inherently variable-width, but it's a flat scheme in that one universal mechanism suffices to represent everything you can represent. UTF-16 appears fixed-width until you realize it isn't, at which point you discover it's segmented and the segmentation scheme is both somewhat complex and likely to be missed entirely in naïve testing.