Re: ASCII-only startup message?

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > recent surveys from W3Techs continues to show steady growth for UTF-8 on
> > >the Web, with 86% of websites currently using UTF-8
> On the Web, yes.  But that's not necessarily the situation with local
> files.

Yes, of course. It is not as easy to survey local files. That being said, in my 
experience the natural tendency is for files to have the same encoding locally 
that they do on the Web, and for Unicode to grow in popularity in local files 
too. You can see this tendency acting in the Emacs source code itself over time, 
and in the source code for other GNU projects. Although Emacs will need to 
support non-UTF-8 encodings for quite some time the overall trend toward UTF-8 
is clear, and it would be reasonable to add an option to Emacs to prefer UTF-8 
in new files in every locale.