Should I happily stay with UTF-8 or should I be ready to change the encoding?

Question

I've built (or I'm building) an application that supports a wide variety of languages. I'm using UTF-8 right now because as I see it, it supports all languages in this world. (?)

However, after reading the article on Wikipedia, it states that while UTF-8 currently uses only 10% of its potential space, there's a possibility that in the future UTF-8 won't be enough?

Should I write my application (which happens to be a web application) to support other character sets as well? Am I worrying over nothing?

Answer 1

I would definitely stay with UTF-8 for the foreseeable future - it covers just about anything you will typically need, and it's the standard encoding used in most web service and other standards. I don't see any reason for going elsewhere, unless it would not support something that you absolutely need.

Answer 2

I don't see that note in the main Wikipedia article on UTF-8, but in any case, given that whatever encoding you choose, it will eventually be outdated, do not spend undue (read: any) time thinking about this - choose something which does the job now and is standard enough that migrating from it will be easy at such time as you need to. And that's UTF-8.

Answer 3

Unless you have a very specific requirement, like display ancient hieroglyphs, you will be fine with utf-8.

When you encounter a language that you are required to support that utf-8 can't help you with, then do the work to switch to something else.

Realistically, this won't happen and you will just save yourself a sack of time.