Keith Moore writes:
actually I haven't seen a single compelling argument to move to utf-8.
The time that programmers waste dealing with today's horrifying mess of
character encodings is time taken away from providing real features for
the users. It's so much time, in fact, that programmers invariably cut
corners, producing occasional failures for the users.
The obvious solution to both of these problems is to settle on a single
character encoding. We've chosen the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode, because
it's compatible with ASCII, it's self-synchronizing, it includes all the
characters we need, etc. The transition plan is straightforward:
(1) add support for that encoding to all readers; then
(2) switch all writers to that encoding; then
(3) convert all stored data to that encoding; then
(4) stop worrying about other encodings.
The costs of #1, #2, and #3 are quite serious, but they're outweighed by
the massive continuing benefits of #4.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago