Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple encoding already allows smaller characters to have the same bytes as subsets of larger characters. Non-canonical is not a big deal on top of that. Also there are other banned bytes you don't need to deal with. > If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong, unless you're re-syncing an invalid stream It's very relevant to explaining the encoding and it matters if you're worried that invalid byte…
> Non-canonical is not a big deal on top of that. Unless you want to actually do anything with the string beyond decode a codepoint.
Non-canonical encodings make it difficult to do things without decoding, but you have bigger problems to deal with in that situation, and the non-canonical encodings don't make it much worse. Don't get into that situation!
Specifically, even with only canonical encodings, one and two byte characters can appear inside the encoding of two and three byte characters. You can't do anything byte-wise at all, unlike UTF-8. But you already said "If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong" so I hope that's not too big of an issue?