Which encoding standard is primarily based on ASCII but allows for a greater number of characters?

The correct answer is UTF-8, which is an encoding standard that builds on the ASCII framework while providing extensive support for a much larger set of characters. UTF-8 is designed to be backward-compatible with ASCII, meaning the first 128 characters are identical to those in ASCII. However, it can encode characters from virtually every language in the world and supports a wide array of symbols and emojis, making it extremely versatile for modern applications that deal with diverse linguistic content.

In contrast to UTF-8, options such as ISO-8859 and Windows-1252 also expand upon ASCII but do so by defining specific character sets primarily for Western languages and certain graphical symbols. While Latin-1, which is often associated with ISO-8859-1, can represent characters beyond standard ASCII, it remains limited in its overall range, especially for languages outside the Western European context. Therefore, while all these standards extend beyond ASCII, UTF-8 is the most comprehensive solution, accommodating the broadest array of international characters and glyphs while maintaining compatibility with existing ASCII data.