Why ASCII still matters
ASCII defines the first 128 code points of Unicode and UTF-8, so every ASCII file is already valid UTF-8. Protocol keywords, config files, identifiers, and URLs live almost entirely in this range.
Control characters
Codes 0–31 are non-printable controls; the ones you'll actually meet are 9 (tab), 10 (line feed \n), and 13 (carriage return \r). Windows line endings are \r\n (13 10), Unix uses \n alone.