Consider switch to UTF-8 Encoding for Strings

[mikera]

It might be sensible to switch to UTF-8 Encoding for String values

Advantages:

• Will typically save some bytes vs. UTF-16, since ASCII characters fit in one byte
• UTF-8 is more widely used in the Internet space

Disadvantages:

• More mapping between platform UTF-16 Strings and UTF-8 (might be performance hit?
• Complexity of dealing with invalid UTF-8 encodings