UTF-8 was hardly "inevitable". We could well have ended up with only UTF-16, or some other variable length encoding that doesn't share the nice properties of UT

UTF-8 was hardly "inevitable". We could well have ended up with only UTF-16, or some other variable length encoding that doesn't share the nice properties of UTF-8. Don't get me wrong, UTF-8 is pretty simple, but it's still brilliant. Also, can it still be self-promotion when you're not promoting yourself or your creations? PS: If you think UTF-8 works purely by "special prefix characters" I advise you to read a touch more about it.