ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when UTF-8 encoding surpassed it; UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII.
ˈæski wʌzðə mˈoʊst kˈɑːmən kˈæɹɪktɚɹ ɛŋkˈoʊdɪŋ ɔnðə wˈɜːld wˈaɪd wˈɛb ʌntˈɪl dᵻsˈɛmbɚ tˈuː θˈaʊzənd sˈɛvən, wˌɛn jˌuːtˌiːˈɛf ˈeɪt ɛŋkˈoʊdɪŋ sɚpˈæst ɪt; jˌuːtˌiːˈɛf ˈeɪt ɪz bˈækwɚd kəmpˈæɾᵻbəl wɪð ˈæski.