From the standpoint of an English speaker, UTF-8 is effectively a (good) compression scheme for Unicode, as opposed to using 2 or more bytes for every character

From the standpoint of an English speaker, UTF-8 is effectively a (good) compression scheme for Unicode, as opposed to using 2 or more bytes for every character. I guess if I were German or Spanish (to say nothing of Asian languages), it would be the opposite of compression :-)