Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 19:20:15 UTC, Marcin Mstowski wrote:
> Character Data Representation
> Architecture<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/cdra/>by
> IBM. It is what you want to do with additions and it is 
> available
> since
> 1995.
> When you come up with an inventive idea, i suggest you to first 
> check what
> was already done in that area and then rethink this again to 
> check if you
> can do this better or improve existing solution. Other 
> approaches are
> usually waste of time and efforts, unless you are doing this 
> for fun or you
> can't use existing solutions due to problems with license, 
> copyrights,
> price, etc.
You might be right, but I gave it a quick look and can't make out 
what the encoding actually is.  There is an appendix that lists 
several possible encodings, including UTF-8!

Also, one of the first pages talks about representations of 
floating point and integer numbers, which are outside the purview 
of the text encodings we're talking about.  I cannot possibly be 
expected to know about every dead format out there.  If you can 
show that it is materially similar to my single-byte encoding 
idea, it might be worth looking into.