...and reasonable. If it was declared as utf8[] then
when the user writes
 ubyte c...

...the declarations

 void foo(ascii[]);
 void foo(utf8[]);
 void foo(utf32[]);

what function does

 foo...

...we should have the primitive types 'ascii','utf8','utf16' and 'utf32' and remove char, wchar...

...meant "encoding elements", i.e. bytes for UTF8 and 16 bit ints for UTF-16...

...example:

    char[] utf32string;
    char[] #UTF16 utf16string;
    char[] #UTF8 utf8string;
    char[] #NATIVE nativeString;

The above mentioned...

...in the current code page. Passing CP_UTF8 to MultiByteToWideChar won't help either, because...

...to char[]
so string can be unicode (UTF8,16,32 internally as required)
idealy with...

isn't utf8 designed for exactly this purpose ?
would the linker fail if the ids...

...what you mean about Unicode but consider
utf8"string" vs. utf16"string" vs. utf32"string...

...uri -> D.Phobos.URI;
utf -> D.Phobos.UTF8;
windows -> D.CRT.windows;
c.stdio -> D...