Denis B. Roegel wrote:
> Among the language attributes, there should IMHO be "default encodings."
> These encodings would be either a pair of < input encoding, output encoding >
> or a pair of lists of encoding, which would enable priorities.
> For instance, English should have as a default < ASCII, OT1 >.
> French should have < latin1, T1 >, Russian could have < koi8-r, X2 >, etc.
> These encodings would then just be triggered when one writes
> \selectlanguage{french}, etc. I haven't tried the new version of babel,

Unfortunatelly many input encodings can be appropriate for a given
language (e.g. for Polish we have at least 3 widely used encodings),
and it may be difficult to judge, which of them should be default
(this may depend on the operating system).  So it probably is not such
a good idea to have global defaults.

On the other hand using different encodings for a language within one
document is somewhat perverse.  So it would be reasonable to have per
document defaults.


Marcin