title: How prevalent is UTF-8 really?
body: <p>How wide-spread is the use of UTF-8 for non-English text, on the WWW or otherwise? I'm interested both in statistical data and the situation in specific countries.</p>
  
  <p>I know that ISO-8859-1 (or 15) is firmly entrenched in Germany - but what about languages where you have to use multibyte encodings anyway, like Japan or China? I know that a few years ago, Japan was still using the various JIS encodings almost exclusively.</p>
  
  <p>Given these observations, would it even be true that UTF-8 is the most common multibyte encoding? Or would it be more correct to say that it's basically only used internally in new applications that specifically target an international market and/or have to work with multi-language texts? Is it acceptable nowadays to have an app that ONLY uses UTF-8 in its output, or would each national market expect output files to be in a different legacy encoding in order to be usable by other apps.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:
  I am NOT asking whether or why UTF-8 is useful or how it works. I know all that. I am asking whether it is actually being adopted widely and replacing older encodings.</strong></p>