UTF-8 IS A BRILLIANT DESIGN

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

UTF-8 was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts and still be backward compatible with ASCII. Every ASCII-encoded file is a valid UTF-8 file, and every UTF-8 encoded file that only has ASCII characters is a valid ASCII file. This post gets into how UTF-8 works. A link to a playground for visualizing and playing around with UTF-8 encoding is available in the post.