UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid Unicode code points using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units.
Key features of UTF-8:
1. Backward compatible with ASCII
2. Dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web (over 98% of websites)
3. Can represent any Unicode character
4. Self-synchronizing (allows resynchronization if bytes are lost)