There's a lot of text out there that isn't markup, or where markup is a sparse minority. Consider anything binary, ebooks, PDFs, various document formats, almo

There's a lot of text out there that isn't markup, or where markup is a sparse minority. Consider anything binary, ebooks, PDFs, various document formats, almost anything in a database, almost all messages sent via messaging apps, almost all emails, any JSON, anything in a protobuf, etc. etc. The vast majority of "text" in the world isn't in HTML/XML. > When compression is involved, there is rarely a difference. Rare is the situation where smaller input to a compression algorithm leads to larger output, and UTF-16 is smaller in lots of languages. It might rarely make a difference you, but that's not the same as rarely making a difference.