RE: ASCII-only startup message?

[Drew Adams]

> 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

It's not just about what proportion of websites use UTF-8.
Emacs is not a website.  We are not redesigning a website.

There are plenty of problems that other _editing_ applications
have with things like Unicode apostrophe/quotation characters.

Such problems promise to be at least as great for Emacs, where
"editing" means so much more than it does for something like
MS Word.

Most importantly, there is _no hurry_ to force Unicode
apostrophes and other problematic choices on Emacs users.
Emacs already supports the use of Unicode fully by _users_.

User choice is primary in Emacs.  Trying to nail down now,
once and for all, as a  design-time decision, is a crazy
form of premature conformance - overengineering.

_Wait and see_ more about how Emacs users use Unicode and
what they want and expect.

_Wait and see_ more about how other editing systems deal
with the problematic issues, such as handling of spelling,
search, etc. wrt things like apostrophes.

There is _no hurry_ to cast this stuff in bronze.
Unicode is great.  But there is no need to go over the
kool-aid top on this regrooving.