RFC: doc/www cleanup

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Fri, 2012-08-03 at 14:33:04 +0100, Simon L. B. Nielsen wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Gabor Kovesdan <gabor at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > 2, Relaxing character entity usage: To be able to read non-ASCII characters
> > on ASCII-only systems, we have been using character entities, like á.
> > But in CJK languages, Greek and Russian every character is non-ASCII so
> > practically they cannot be used nor were they used. So they are only used in
> > ISO-8859 encodings (except Greek, which is also from this family). In fact,
> > displaying these Latin-based characters nowadays isn't that problematic any
> > more. Furthermore, if you edit text in a given language then we can suppose
> > that you understand the language so you know what you should see and you
> > know how to configure your system if you don't see the desired result. As a
> > result, these entities nowadays don't have any real advantage any more but
> > they highly "pollute" the text and make it much harder to edit and read. One
> 
> I agree that the entities should generally not be used. I think we
> should just switch to UTF-8 and charecterset wherever possible to
> simplify it even more.
> 
> And on that note, kill the useless character-set part of all our
> language directories which generate horrible paths with no additional
> value.
> 
> > exception is using characters in a specific language that aren't present
> > there, e.g. a non-English developer name in the English documentation, etc.
> 
> UTF-8 would fix that.

Last time I brought this up (trying to get rid of silly entities and
the bogus charset name of the directories), I was told that our
toolchain didn't fully grok UTF-8 yet, which was the reason we still had
this de_DE.ISO8859-1 nonsense.

The move to XML should really, really convert all files to UTF-8, drop
that from the directories, and get rid of entities like ä or
é, etc.o

Just my two cents
Uli