Re: coding system

[Oliver Scholz]

stromme@mi.uib.no (Stein A. Stromme) writes:

> [lawrence mitchell]
>
> | Emacs thinks the buffer is an XML file.  The XML spec states
> | that any XML document which does not explicitly specify its
> | coding system in its opening line.   e.g.
> | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?> for latin-1 should
> | be taken to be encoded as UTF-8.  As such, Emacs tries to do the
> | right thing, and ensure that the document is saved as UTF-8.
> | 
> | To avoid the questioning regarding the coding-system, either,
> | specify the coding-system in the <?xml ?> declaration, or save
> | the file as UTF-8.
>
> Thanks for the explanation.  In reality, the file is automatically
> generated (by blogmax.el), so I'll have to go digging for the right
> spot!
>
> Btw, is the time (and Emacs) ripe now for going utf-8 as default?
> What are the pros and cons?  (Apologies if this is off-topic.)
[...]

In my experience it is fine, although I hear that there are some
issues with CJK. But I've been using UTF-8 as default for several
months now and I don't think I encountered real problems. Except maybe
(as I seem to recall) that my Gnus did not sent proper UTF-8 two or
three times, probably because of clashes with the encoding of the
message to which I replied (I don't quite remember); but I suspect
that I had even in this regard less problems than if I were using
Latin-n (with n > 1).

Besides the Latin-1 repertoire I mostly use "Greek and Coptic",
"Greek Extended", "General Punctuation" and now and then "Box
Drawing" and "Miscellaneous Symbols". I won't switch back, at least
not for my local files.

    Oliver
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