RE: Publishing in UTF-8?

Andrea,

Can you give some examples of what bad things happen when using UTF-8 as the
character-encoding for HTML documents? For example, do certain browser
versions not display them correctly? Do you have data on which versions have
problems?

Much obliged,
Lenny Turetsky
Senior Member Technical Staff
salesforce.com
lturetsky@salesforce.com
+1 415 901 7040


-----Original Message-----
From: A. Vine [mailto:avine@eng.sun.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 4:33 PM
To: Mieko Komagata (by way of Martin J. Duerst <duerst@w3.org>)
Cc: www-international@w3.org
Subject: Re: Publishing in UTF-8?


"Mieko Komagata (by way of Martin J. Duerst )" wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> We have a web based application in English and are working on localizing
it
> to French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We are considering publishing
pages
> in UTF-8 in these languages. I would like to know the advantages and
> disadvantages on using UTF-8 over ISO-8859-1. How common UTF-8 is? I
> randomly visited some sites in France and Italy, but I did not find a site
> in UTF-8.
> I saw a Netscape 4.x browser bug using NCR in UTF-8 on
> http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/unicode_web.html. Any input would be
> appreciated.
> 

I don't think the end-user world is ready for UTF-8.  If you use it, I
believe there's a large percent of the worldwide population which will
see gibberish.  If you're restricting the languages to French, Italian,
German, and Spanish, you might as well use ISO-8859-1 at the point of
publishing.  Internally, though, I recommend you use UTF-8 to allow you
to expand later on.

My thoughts,
Andrea
-- 
Andrea Vine, avine@eng.sun.com, iPlanet i18n architect
"A bibliophile is a lover of books; a bibliomane, a wildly enthusiastic
collector. An abandoned fanatic, once he succumbs to bibliolatry,
graduates into a bibliomaniac. While a bibliomaniac's spouse might easily
become a bibliophobe, his arch nemesis would be a biblioclast: a
destroyer
of books." -- Bill Strubbe, A Bibliophile in Britain