Thank you. That is very good to learn and I looked over the wikipedia article. But as far as byte order, how is that architecture independent? Is it just that utf-8 dictates that the order of the bytes always be the same, so whatever system you're on, you ignore its norm, and interpret bytes in the order utf-8 tells you to?
Yes, basically. UTF-8 doesn't encode a code point as a single integer; it encodes it as a sequence of bytes, with a particular order, where some of the bits are used to represent the code point, and some of them are just used to represent whether you are looking at an initial byte or a continuation byte.
Poorly phrased. It can take multiple bytes to fully define one codepoint, but the encoding is defined in terms of a stream of single bytes. In other words, each unit is one byte, hence flipping each unit gives back the same unit.
