alt Hacker News> Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again.
Whenever I hear this, I hear "all text files should be 50% larger for no reason".
UTF-8 is pretty similar to the old code page system.
Hm? UTF-8 encodes all of ASCII with one byte per character, and is pretty efficient for everything else. I think the only advantage UTF-16 has over UTF-8 is that some ranges (such as Han characters I believe?) are often 3 bytes of UTF-8 while they're 2 bytes of UTF-16. Is that your use case? Seems weird to describe that as "all text files" though?