Translations:UTF-8/1/en

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding, which in this instance means that it uses 1 to 4 bytes per symbol. So, the first UTF-8 byte is used for encoding ASCII, giving the character set full backwards compatibility with ASCII. UTF-8 means that ASCII and Latin characters are interchangeable with little increase in the size of the data, because only the first byte is used. Users of Eastern alphabets such as Japanese, who have been assigned a higher byte range are unhappy, as this results in as much as a 50% redundancy in their data.