You can either have Javascript uses UTF16 because UCS2 is dead. Or you can have variable width is stupid. JavaScript supports UTF16 (otherwise; no emoji). UCS2 is also a Unicode standard - just an old one, in their own words:

> In particular, for the purposes of data exchange, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are identical formats.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030818043641/http://www.unicod...