Unicode

Unicode, the text encoding format that supports many languages, including Asian characters, has been getting more and more popular on the internet, according to Google. It looks like Unicode is in a 3-way tie with ASCII and Western European encodings, but the trend is heavily in favour of UTF-8, the version of Unicode that still uses 8 bits for English (like ASCII) but also supports the full spectrum of other languages.

The good news is that this means that UTF-8, which is already very well supported, will become the new "ASCII" and we don't have to worry about encoding options too much anymore.