The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike (2003)
I think we should take a moment to appreciate how great UTF-8 is, and how it well it worked out. It's easy to get disillusioned with internet standards when IPv6 is taking forever and messaging is all proprietary locked down protocols. Yet character encodings used to be a horrible mess and now it's not. In the 90's the only practical solution was for everyone to use the same OS, same word processor, same web browser, and who cares about talking with foreigners anyway?<p>I don't think it was always guaranteed to turn out well. China and Japan could have stayed with their own encodings. Microsoft and Apple could have done incompatible things. The tech world is full of bad things we're stuck with because there's no way to coordinate a change.<p>Unicode has it's flaws, UTF-16 is still lurking here and there, everyone loves to argue about emoji, but overall text just works now.