UTF-16 and UTF-32 are older than UTF-8.
Besides, at the beginning people were really against variable size encodings. UTF-8 won despite the Unicode consortium and all the committees effort, not because of it.
Besides, at the beginning people were really against variable size encodings. UTF-8 won despite the Unicode consortium and all the committees effort, not because of it.
UTF-16 is not a fixed-size encoding thanks to surrogate pairs. UCS-2 is a fixed-size encoding but can’t represent code points outside the BMP (such as emoji) which makes it unsuitable for many applications.
Besides, most of the time individual code points aren’t what you care about anyway, so the cost of a variable-sized encoding like UTF-8 is only a small part of the overall work you need to support international text.
I base this number off the "Stream-Safe Text Format" which suggests that while it's preferred that you accept infinitely-long characters, a cap of 31 code points is more or less acceptable.
0: Similarly, U+1F1 "DZ" is two characters, but one Unicode code point, which is much, much worse as it means you can no longer treat encoded strings as concatenations of encoded characters. UTF-8-as-such doesn't have this problem - any 'string' of code points can only be encoded as the concatenation of the encodings of its elements - but UTF-8 in practice does inherit the character-level version of this problem from Unicode.
* all content will increase significantly in size using utf32 (utf16 is also variable-size, and markups being extremely common and usually ascii, while utf8 is not a guaranteed winner against 16 it often is)
* unicode itself is variable-size encoding due to combining code points, so a fixed-size encoding really doesn’t net you anything
That sound more like an anti-feature resulting in unstable programs that almost work.
It's both. It will generally ignore non-ascii data, but that is very commonly something you don't care about, in which case it's a net advantage over plain not working at all.
Either way, a complete rewrite of the text handling functionality should give you flawless functionality. At this point in time, all the important ecosystems that use UTF-8 are almost there.
This is very different from the other encodings where a complete rewrite of the text handling functionality is needed just not to fail every time. That made all the important ecosystems that used other encodings to get almost there much sooner, but there was an important period when everything was broken, and the improvements are much slower nowadays, because when you need to fix every aspect of something, iterations take much more labor.
However, as you say, by 1996 people were already using the older UCS-2 standard.
And sure they updated it in 2003 but "don't use invalid codepoints" is not a really notable update.