

UTF-8 The most beautiful hack [video] - austengary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4

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memracom
Shameless self promotion. He is breathless that UTF-8 encoding was designed on
the back of a napkin. Well it sure as h*ll should have been that simple and
that quick. After all it merely applies an ancient principle that was used by
Baudot encoding, BCD, ASCII, EBCDIC and even HDLC. Use special escape
characters to change the meaning of the following codes for some number of
bytes following.

Blehhh... UTF-8 is important but it is the natural evolution of Unicode. As
soon as folks decided to have one standard encoding to be used for all of the
glyphs used in all human languages, UTF-8 was inevitable.

This reminds me of when I invented RLE in 1978. Later in 1986 someone else
patented it, and GIF format ended up being encumbered by these sort of patents
for many years. Was I a genius? NO! RLE was obvious and many others also
invented it. I expect that the first inventor was a typist back in the 1930s
or even earlier, who would have used RLE as a way to write down the encoding
of an ASCII art piece without revealing the image itself.

~~~
qu4z-2
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.

