UTF-8 is a Brilliant Design

This article by Vishnu Haridas delves into the ingenious design of UTF-8 encoding, explaining its ability to represent millions of characters from diverse languages and scripts while maintaining backward compatibility with ASCII. It details the variable-width nature of UTF-8, how it uses different byte patterns for single and multi-byte characters, and the process of determining character code points. The author provides practical examples, including decoding Hindi characters and text with emojis, and discusses UTF-8 in contrast to other encodings like UTF-16 and UTF-32. The article also introduces a "UTF-8 Playground" tool developed by the author for interactive visualization of the encoding process.