<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>
submitted a proposal for one that had faster implementation
characteristics and introduced the improvement that 7-bit ASCII
characters would <i>only</i> represent themselves; all multibyte
sequences would include only bytes where the high bit was set. This
original proposal, FSS-UTF (File System Safe UCS Transformation Format),
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>.