Which coding scheme do most microcomputers utilize?

Most microcomputers utilize the ASCII coding scheme because it represents text in computers and other devices that use text. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit binary integers. This includes the English alphabet, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters, providing a foundation for text representation across various platforms and programming environments.

While UTF-8 is also widely used today, especially for web and international applications due to its ability to encode a wider range of characters beyond the basic Latin alphabet, ASCII is still fundamental in computing because it has been in use since the early days of computers. BMP, which stands for Bitmap, is a format for images and not a coding scheme for characters, while XML is used for data representation and does not specify how specific characters or text are encoded at the byte level. Thus, ASCII remains the more relevant and correct answer in the context of the question.