my Terrible Take™ for the afternoon is if it wasn't for xml it probably would have taken way longer to get everybody on the unicode train (and utf8 in particular)
i was doing a lot of localization work in the early 2000s and believe me you would not want to live in a world without unicode
the operating systems kinda flirted with it but apps didn't, so i am pretty confident that the thing that finally got everybody up to speed was they had to deal with xml
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