3blue1brownUTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8!
Audience:
UTF-8 is the world’s most used text encoding. It cleverly extends 7-bit ASCII into an 8-bit multi-byte code, equipped with many nice properties.
But what happens if UTF-8 runs out? Can we extend it infinitely whilst preserving those properties? The answer is yes! I call the extension that I have invented “UTF-8000”.
This website lays out the specification for UTF-8000, explaining Coding Theory terms like ‘self-synchronization’ and ‘self-punctuation’ as we go. It should be a good educational website that intuitively explains how one might derive these encodings oneself.
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There is no introduction to what this is supposed to be. No actual explanations. If someone is not already familiar with UTF or similar coding schemes, this seems rather useless.
I think a good article would be a mix of theory and application, this article is mainly application, describing a new idea. Additionally, the issue about running out of UTF characters relatively soonish is highly unlikely, having more than 1 million UTF8 characters available and having used barely 150k. The protocols utf16 and 32 suppport much more unique characters, with utf16 supporting about 1 million character I believe, and same for utf32 (it is capped at 1 million, however it can in theory support 4,294,967,296=2^32 characters I believe). That means that the existing utf protocols are already enough to support countless numbers.
Additionally, there is no clear place where the capacity of the protocol is stated.
hmm