UTF-8

UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding of Unicode code points into one to four bytes. It preserves ASCII byte values, making ASCII text valid UTF-8 without modification.

Unicode code point: A numerical value assigned to a character or other element in the Unicode standard. UTF-8 encodes these values into byte sequences.
Rob Pike: An American computer scientist who co-designed UTF-8 and helped create the Go programming language. Pike co-designed UTF-8 with Ken Thompson in 1992.
HTML: The standard markup language for structuring documents on the web. Web documents commonly declare UTF-8 as their character encoding.
UTF-16: A Unicode encoding that represents code points using one or two 16-bit code units. It is a common Unicode alternative with different storage and indexing behavior.
UTF-8 continuation byte: A UTF-8 byte whose leading bits are 10, marking it as a continuation in a multibyte sequence. Continuation-byte patterns distinguish later bytes from sequence-leading bytes.
Ken Thompson: An American computer scientist who co-created Unix and the B programming language. Thompson co-designed UTF-8 with Rob Pike to support international text.
JSON: A text-based data interchange format built from objects, arrays, numbers, strings, and literals. JSON exchanged between systems is required to use UTF-8.
UTF-32: A Unicode encoding that represents every code point with a fixed 32-bit code unit. Its fixed-width representation contrasts with UTF-8's compact variable-width sequences.
UTF-8 lead byte: The first byte of a multibyte UTF-8 sequence, indicating its length and contributing bits of the encoded value. Its leading bits reveal how many bytes encode the code point.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs: An operating system developed at Bell Labs as a successor to Unix, released in the 1990s. UTF-8 was developed for Plan 9's use of Unicode text.

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