UTF-8 Original Proposal

One important way in which the UTF-8 standard differs from Ken Thompson's and Rob Pike's original proposal: The 5th and 6th bytes were eliminated. The encoding is now always 1 to 4 bytes long.

But UTF-8 can still represent all of Unicode's 1,114,112 code points.

I'm a big fan of a lot of these 'back of the napkin' and 'seat of our pants' origin stories of the standards we often take for granted today. It always helps me appreciate what we have and the possibility that we can create something new.

r@google.com ...