> This is exactly my point: lots of code also treats utf-8 as if it were ASCII. Two things to this: - In many cases this is an entirely non-destructive mistak

> This is exactly my point: lots of code also treats utf-8 as if it were ASCII. Two things to this: - In many cases this is an entirely non-destructive mistake to make. This is an advantage of utf-8, that intermediaries that only care about ascii characters (even in the presence of extended characters) can work with it. - It will become readily apparent that you've got a problem on the first attempt to port your app to any language with a non-ascii script. With UTF-16 it only becomes apparent when you go beyond the BMP.