This is not my area of expertise, so my understanding may be incomplete.<p>If some is &quot;in Unicode&quot; it&#x27;s a list of codepoints - that is the &quot;thing&quot; to be encoded. I don&#x27;t see that ambiguity. It&#x27;s a list of numbers, it&#x27;s not fluffy kittens in the network or something. UTF-8 is a way of transcribing that list of numbers as 1s and 0s. That is the encoding process. Once it&#x27;s encoded to 1s and 0s, it&#x27;s not anything. It&#x27;s just 1s and 0s.<p>One person&#x27;s utf8 encoded 1s and 0s may be another person&#x27;s audio signal. It doesn&#x27;t really make sense to talk about the encoded data as being utf8. It&#x27;s the encoded &#x2F; decoding process that&#x27;s utf8. Sure, it might be utf8 decodable.<p>In terms of json, it&#x27;s the same deal. You have the &quot;thing&quot;, simple nested objects&#x2F;lists&#x2F;numbers in memory. It only makes sense to talk about json when you&#x27;re talking about the process of transcribing those.<p>In both cases you have a &quot;thing&quot; (I think of it as &quot;real&quot;, but in a way it&#x27;s an abstract concept - how does Python represent a dict, I have no idea), you can encode those things into a tangible list of 1s and 0s.<p>That&#x27;s why they&#x27;re the same. And people aren&#x27;t generally confused about the json encoding decoding process.