Re: ASCII-only startup message?

[Paul Eggert]

Yuri Khan wrote:
> <contentious suggestion>
> Alternatively, new buffers could be initially created with the UTF-8
> encoding, leaving the locale-specified encoding only for dealing with
> legacy files.
> </contentious suggestion>

It would be reasonable to add an option to Emacs to behave that way, though we 
should probably not make this behavior the default (at least, not without having 
more experience in its use).

As for UTF-8 “conquering the world”; obviously it hasn’t done that yet, and 
Emacs will need to support legacy encodings for quite some time. That being 
said, recent surveys from W3Techs continues to show steady growth for UTF-8 on 
the Web, with 86% of websites currently using UTF-8 (up from 82% a year ago). 
All other encodings are declining in use, or at best remaining constant to 
within the stated precision of measurement (e.g., EUC-KR at 0.4%).

http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/character_encoding