UTF-8
acronymStands for: Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit code units
The encoding that writes each Unicode code point as one to four bytes and keeps ASCII as single bytes; the encoding the web requires.
Its design is why it won: ASCII text is already valid UTF-8, no byte of a longer character falls in the ASCII range, and the first byte of each character says how long it is, so a reader can find its place anywhere in a stream. Its byte patterns are strict too: C0, C1 and F5 to FF never appear, and a decoder that meets ill-formed bytes replaces them with U+FFFD instead of guessing. Text that shows é where é belongs is UTF-8 read in the wrong charset.
Also known as: utf8