Which coding standard is most commonly used for text files in computers and the Internet?

The most commonly used coding standard for text files in computers and the Internet is UTF-8. This character encoding can represent every character in the Unicode character set and is designed to be backward compatible with ASCII. UTF-8 is versatile, efficient, and widely adopted due to its ability to use one byte for standard ASCII characters and extend to multiple bytes for other characters, which is important for displaying text in various languages and symbols that might not be covered by basic ASCII.

While ASCII itself is a foundational character encoding that was widely used in the past, it is limited to 128 characters, primarily the English alphabet, digits, and some control characters. Although it enabled early computing and communications, it doesn't accommodate many of the characters used in other languages, which diminishes its effectiveness in today's global environment.

Overall, the transition to UTF-8 allows for a richer representation of text across platforms and applications, making it the more appropriate choice for modern text file encoding.