Personally, I prefer UTF-8 as well. However, I think this whole debate about choice of encoding gets blown out of proportion. Consider the following diagram:

Personally, I prefer UTF-8 as well. However, I think this whole debate about choice of encoding gets blown out of proportion. Consider the following diagram: [user-perceived characters] <-+ ^ | | | v | [characters] <-> [grapheme clusters] | ^ ^ | | | | v v | [bytes] <-> [codepoints] [glyphs] <----------+ Choice of encoding only affects the conversion from bytes to codepoints, which is pretty straight-forward: The subtleties lie elsewhere...