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Ken Thompson and Rob Pike

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UTF-8

Ken Thompson and Rob Pike · 1992

UTF-8 is a variable-width Unicode encoding co-designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in 1992. It guarantees ASCII compatibility, supports all 1,112,064 Unicode code points, and became the dominant web encoding — over 90% of pages in 2019. Its strength is pragmatic interoperability; its weakness is zero tolerance for malformed input and no compression benefit.