I just discovered some bogus information I'd been purveying, which is that UTF-8, a way of encoding Unicode characters (actually code points), may include up to six bytes per character.
In fact, that used to be the standard, but per RFC3629, when Unicode merged with an ISO standard, the cut off was set to 4, covering hexadecimal numbers U+0000..U+10FFFF.
The Python docs themselves give a clear, if abbreviated, introduction to the history:
There’s a related ISO standard, ISO 10646. Unicode and ISO 10646 were originally separate efforts, but the specifications were merged with the 1.1 revision of Unicode.This featured chronology at the Unicode.org website seems to stop in 1992 and doesn't talk about the 1.1 revision.
