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Table of Contents

• ↓ Purpose of this document
• ↓ Background
• ↓ The facts
• ↓ Opaque data argument
• ↓ Glyphs, graphemes and other Unicode species
• ↓ Asian texts: UTF-8 vs. UTF-16
• ↓ Top Alternatives to utf8everywhere.org

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Official Contact & Profiles

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Content Snippets from utf8everywhere.org

"Our goal is to promote usage and support of the UTF-8 encoding and to convince that it should be the default choice of encoding for storing text strings in memory or on disk, for communication and all other uses. We believe that our approach improves performance, reduces complexity of software and helps prevent many Unicode-related bugs. We suggest that other encodings of Unicode (or text, in general) belong to rare edge-cases of optimization and should be avoided by mainstream users."

"In particular, we believe that the very popular UTF-16 encoding (often mistakenly referred to as ‘widechar’ or simply ‘Unicode’ in the Windows world) has no place in library APIs except for specialized text processing libraries, e.g. ICU."

"This document also recommends choosing UTF-8 for internal string representation in Windows applications, despite the fact that this standard is less popular there, both due to historical reasons and the lack of native UTF-8 support by the API. We believe that, even on this platform, the following arguments outweigh the lack of native support. Also, we recommend forgetting forever what ‘ANSI codepages’ are and what they were used for. It is in the user’s bill of rights to mix any number of languages in any text string."

"Across the industry, many localization-related bugs have been blamed on programmers’ lack of knowledge in Unicode. We, however, believe that for an application that is not supposed to specialize in text, the infrastructure can and should make it possible for the program to be unaware of encoding issues. For instance, a file copy utility should not be written differently to support non-English file names. In this manifesto, we will also explain what a programmer should be doing if they do not want to dive into all complexities of Unicode and do not really care about what’s inside the string."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for utf8everywhere.org:

Purpose of this document

Background

The facts

Opaque data argument

Glyphs, graphemes and other Unicode species

Asian texts: UTF-8 vs. UTF-16