1 <p>In July
1992, the
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open" title=
"X/Open">X/Open
</a> committee XoJIG was looking for a better encoding. Dave Prosser of
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_System_Laboratories" title=
"Unix System Laboratories">Unix System Laboratories
</a>
2 submitted a proposal for one that had faster implementation
3 characteristics and introduced the improvement that
7-bit ASCII
4 characters would
<i>only
</i> represent themselves; all multibyte
5 sequences would include only bytes where the high bit was set. This
6 original proposal, FSS-UTF (File System Safe UCS Transformation Format),
7 was similar in concept to UTF-
8, but lacked the crucial property of
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-synchronizing_code" title=
"Self-synchronizing code">self-synchronization
</a>.