Question

It seems to me if UTF-8 was the only encoding used everywhere ever, there would be a lot less issues with code:

• Don’t even need to think about encoding issues.
• No issues with mixed 1-2-byte character streaming, because everything uses 2 bytes.
• Browsers don’t need to wait for the <meta> tag specifying encoding before they can do anything. StackOverflow doesn’t even have the meta tag, making browsers download the full page first, slowing page rendering.
• You would never see ? and other random symbols on old web pages (e.g. in place of Microsoft Word’s special [read: horrible] quotes).
• More characters can be represented in UTF-8.
• Other things I can’t think of right now.

So why haven’t the inferior encodings been nuked from space?

Answer 1

• Don’t even need to think about encoding issues.

True. Except for all the data that’s still in the old ASCII format.

• No issues with mixed 1-2-byte character streaming, because everything uses 2 bytes.

Incorrect. UTF-8 is variable length, from 1 to 6 or so bytes.

• Browsers don’t need to wait for the tag specifying encoding before they can do anything. StackOverflow doesn’t even have the meta tag, making browsers download the full page first, slowing page rendering.

Browsers don’t generally wait for the full page, they make a guess based on the first part of the page data.

• You would never see ? and other random symbols on old web pages (e.g. in place of Microsoft Word’s special [read: horrible] quotes).

Except for all those other old web pages that use other non-UTF-8 encodings (the non-English speaking world is pretty big).

• More characters can be represented in UTF-8.

True. Your problems of data validation just got harder, too.