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What's not to understand about UTF8? It's a way of coding up points in the Unicode space. You decode the bits and it yields a number that corresponds to a glyph, possibly with some decorations. The only thing special about UTF8 is that it happens to write ASCII as ASCII, which is nice as long as you realize that there is much outside that. Either that, or I'm completely off base and part of the vast horde who don't g…
Variable width encodings are inherently harder to understand. And while UTF-8 tries very hard to be simple whenever possible, it does have some nonobvious constraints that make it significantly more complex than the actual simplest variable-width encoding (a continuation bit and then 7 data bits).
Re: Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]
#141Unicode is variable length even if you use 32 bits, because glyphs sometimes require multiple codepoints. People sometimes write as if using more bits will remove complexity from Unicode but it doesn't really, you still need to handle multiple units at once sometimes.