Seems obvious, ASCII had an unused bit, so you use it. Why did they even bother ... | Hacker News

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		frollogaston 3 months ago \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: UTF-8 is a brilliant design Seems obvious, ASCII had an unused bit, so you use it. Why did they even bother with UTF-16 and -32 then?

int_19h 3 months ago [–]

Because the original design assumed that 16 bits are enough to encode everything worth encoding, hence UCS2 (not UTF-16, yet) being the easiest and most straightforward way to represent things.

frollogaston 3 months ago | [–]

Ah ok. Well even then, you end up spending 16 bits for every ASCII character.

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