UTF-8: A Stroke of Genius

UTF-8's brilliance lies in its elegant backward compatibility with ASCII while supporting millions of characters. This article lucidly explains UTF-8's design: it cleverly uses leading bits to signify character length (1-4 bytes), with ASCII characters needing only 1 byte. Examples demonstrate encoding and decoding text with ASCII and emojis. Compared to other encodings, UTF-8's balance of compatibility and extensibility is a masterpiece of design.