"But UTF-8 has a dark side, a single character can take up anywhere between one to six bytes to represent in binary."<p>What? No! UTF-8 takes, <i>at most</i>, 4 bytes per code point.<p>"But UTF-8 isn't very efficient at storing Asian symbols, taking a whole three bytes. The eastern masses revolted at the prospect of having to buy bigger hard drives and made their own encodings."<p>Many asian users object to UTF-8/Unicode because of the Han Unification, and because many characters supported in other character sets are not present in Unicode. Size of the binary encoding has nothing to do with it -- in fact, most east-asian characters take 4 bytes in UTF-16.<p>"American programmers: In your day to day grind, it's superfluous to put a 'u' in front of every single string."<p>American programmers <i>who aren't morons</i>: Use 'u' or the first time somebody tries to run an accent through your code, it'll come out looking like line noise.