That's a misleading date for UTF-dominance -- as the link notes, it's counting things as ASCII if they only have ASCII characters, no matter what the encoding w

That's a misleading date for UTF-dominance -- as the link notes, it's counting things as ASCII if they only have ASCII characters, no matter what the encoding was specified as, and ASCII is a subset of UTF-8. I'd put UTF-8's real prominence with the popularity of XML (where it was the default encoding). That was specified in 1998, and ubiquitous within a few years. Nobody at the height of XML would have tried doing a non-UTF design for anything.