> A Chinese plaintext document in UTF-8 is still smaller in memory footprint than an equivalent English document in ASCII.
When you need to process Chinese text you don’t care how much an equivalent English document would take. You only care about the difference between different encodings of Chinese language. And UTF16 is more compact for East Asian languages.
> most documents aren't plaintext
That’s true for the web, and that’s why UTF8 is the clear winner there. In a desktop software, in a videogame, in a database — not so much.
When you need to process Chinese text you don’t care how much an equivalent English document would take. You only care about the difference between different encodings of Chinese language. And UTF16 is more compact for East Asian languages.
> most documents aren't plaintext
That’s true for the web, and that’s why UTF8 is the clear winner there. In a desktop software, in a videogame, in a database — not so much.