[jammycakes]

Nobody should be sticking to plain ascii/latin-1, and certainly not inexperienced developers. The only valid reason for using anything other than UTF-8 these days is that you are interacting with a legacy system that doesn't support it.

Unicode isn't a "fancy thing" that is best left to "people that know what they're doing." It's the difference between displaying a name such as Siån correctly and as a bunch of hieroglyphics.

Besides, even for experienced developers who know what they're doing, if you're imposing any form of ceremony or special considerations around using Unicode, you're increasing the risk of bugs and mistakes.

That's why I say Unicode should be made the default. It's legacy encodings such as Latin-1 that should be treated on a need-to-know basis.