This militancy to force everyone to use UTF-8 is bad engineering. I'm thinking of GNOME 3, where you aren't even allowed the option of choosing ASCII as a default setting, only UTF-8 or ISO-8859-x. A default setting is just as important for what it filters out as for what it passes through. I use a lot of older tools on *nix that are ASCII-only, in tool chains that slurp and munge text. If the chain includes any of these UTF-8-only apps, I'm constantly dealing with the problem of invalid ASCII passing through.