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Re: 27.0.50; Use utf-8 is all our Elisp files
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: 27.0.50; Use utf-8 is all our Elisp files |
Date: |
Fri, 21 Dec 2018 13:07:09 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.2.1 |
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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.
- Re: 27.0.50; Use utf-8 is all our Elisp files,
Paul Eggert <=