UTF8 History

With the approval of ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) as an international standard and the anticipated wide spread use of this universal coded character set (UCS), it is necessary for historically ASCII based operating systems to devise ways to cope with representation and handling of the large number of characters that are possible to be encoded by this new standard. An easy way to remember this transformation format is to note that the number of high-order 1’s in the first byte signifies the number of bytes in the multibyte character:

The UCS value is just the concatenation of the v bits in the multibyte encoding. With the approval of ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) as an international standard and the anticipated wide spread use of this universal coded character set (UCS), it is necessary for historically ASCII based operating systems to devise ways to cope with representation and handling of the large number of characters that are possible to be encoded by this new standard.

Source: xahlee.info