Re: [Emacs-diffs] master db828f6: Don't rely on defaults in decoding UTF-8 encoded Lisp files

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

stephen@xemacs.org wrote:
> This is partly due to UTF-8 being the encoding of
>   > choice for HTML and XML, where UTF-8 overtook the older 8-bit
>   > encodings in 2008 and now is by far the dominant encoding.
>
> On the commercial internet, yes, but not for government and academic
> sites in Japan and China.

I think your information is out of date.  Yes, ten years ago there was a lot of 
non-UTF-8 out there, but nowadays they've largely moved on to UTF-8.

For fun I just now visited a few of the top government and academic websites in 
Japan:

http://www.japan.go.jp/
http://www.mofa.go.jp/
http://nettv.gov-online.go.jp/
http://www.e-kokusei.go.jp/
https://www.env.go.jp/
http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
http://www.osaka-u.ac.jp/
http://www.keio.ac.jp/

I configured my browser to say that I preferred Japanese text.  All ten web 
sites gave me UTF-8.  Feel free to canvass China, but I daresay you'll find the 
same.

Of course one can still find a few web sites using other encodings, but like it 
or not, UTF-8 dominates now.