What is the most prevalent encoding standard used today?

The most prevalent encoding standard used today is UTF-8. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters (code points) in Unicode. One of the key advantages of UTF-8 is its compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 Unicode characters are identical to ASCII, making it easy for systems that rely on ASCII to adopt UTF-8 without extensive changes.

UTF-8's popularity arises from its efficiency and ability to represent characters from virtually all languages, which is essential in our increasingly globalized digital environment. Since it can dynamically accommodate a variety of characters while remaining space-efficient for ASCII text, it has become the de facto standard for encoding text on the web, as well as in numerous applications and programming languages.

In contrast, other encoding standards like ASCII and ISO-8859 are more limited. ASCII only supports a small set of 128 characters, covering basic English letters, digits, and control characters, making it inadequate for many international languages. ISO-8859, while offering multiple variations to support specific languages, still does not encompass the full range of characters available in Unicode. UTF-16, while it can also encode all Unicode characters, is less commonly used due to its larger storage requirements and inefficiencies for