Re: 27.0.50; Use utf-8 is all our Elisp files

[Paul Eggert]

[removing address@hidden and adding address@hidden to cc list]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Which markup is not necessary for display, in your opinion?

At most all that's useful is markup that distinguishes Chinese and Japanese 
variants of Han characters; this might also include hanja (Korean) and Chữ Nôm 
(Vietnamese) variants if we ever added such characters to etc/HELLO. Such markup 
might be useful because a significant set of east Asian users dislike Unicode's 
Han unification and prefer specific variants of Han characters. I'm not aware of 
any other set of users who dislike unification in that way.

> That markup is precisely what keeps the charset properties on the
> corresponding greetings.  Removing it would be losing information that
> HELLO is trying to preserve.

Although the etc/HELLO markup might be of interest to those who care about 
annotating languages in the text, it's irrelevant to the ordinary purpose of 
that file, which is to show textual translations of "Hello", as examples, to an 
audience that doesn't know all those languages, but who can easily see the 
language names in the English (or native-language) parts of the text without 
involving any of the markup.

It's a bit like reading a translation of (say) "War and Peace". Most people just 
want to read the translated text. A small fraction might want to know which part 
of the original was written in Russian, which in French, which in English, etc. 
Markup can help that small fraction, but just gets in the way of the primary use.

> Is it possible that you are looking
> at a file/buffer that was modified from its original contents?

No, I was using Emacs 26 by mistake. Sorry about the noise.

It's still not a good user interface, though, as it is difficult to see the 
markup's effect when visiting etc/HELLO in the usual way, and this makes it hard 
to see mistakes in the markup. etc/HELLO is littered with so much useless 
markup, and the effect of markup errors is so subtle, and it's so much of a pain 
to edit the markup in its ordinary form of display, that the file is not a good 
showroom for how to maintain multilingual text. It's not a good sign that there 
seem to be errors in the possibly-useful (i.e., CJ) markup that nobody has 
noticed since the markup was introduced in May, and that I noticed these errors 
now only because I was visiting the file literally.