UTF-8 – "The most elegant hack"
We should be grateful to UTF-8 for saving us from fixed multibyte Internet (so persistently pushed by MS, IBM and others), which would have made little sense in this predominantly 8-bit world. I remember someone saying at the time: the future is 16-bit modems and floppy disks anyway, so why not switch to Unicode now? Somehow that sounded absurd to me.<p>Anyway, 20 years later, hardware is still mostly 8-bit, and basically nobody cares about Unicode apart from font designers and the Unicode Consortium.<p>(On a side note, UTF-8 as a hack is a distant relative to Huffman encoding, itself a beautiful thing.)