UTF-8 The most beautiful hack [video]

Shameless self promotion. He is breathless that UTF-8 encoding was designed on the back of a napkin. Well it sure as h*ll should have been that simple and that quick. After all it merely applies an ancient principle that was used by Baudot encoding, BCD, ASCII, EBCDIC and even HDLC. Use special escape characters to change the meaning of the following codes for some number of bytes following.

Blehhh... UTF-8 is important but it is the natural evolution of Unicode. As soon as folks decided to have one standard encoding to be used for all of the glyphs used in all human languages, UTF-8 was inevitable.

This reminds me of when I invented RLE in 1978. Later in 1986 someone else patented it, and GIF format ended up being encumbered by these sort of patents for many years. Was I a genius? NO! RLE was obvious and many others also invented it. I expect that the first inventor was a typist back in the 1930s or even earlier, who would have used RLE as a way to write down the encoding of an ASCII art piece without revealing the image itself.