Re: [SumsaultRT #212] iso-8859-1 vs. utf-8

Mark Stosberg wrote:

>>>provided that you serve them as text/html (but this applies 
>>>trivially to application/xhtml+xml), you can add (or amend an 
>>>existing entry) the following directive:
>>>AddType text/html;charset=iso-8859-1	html
>>>      
>>>
>
>Thanks for the responses. So both "iso-8859-1" and "utf-8" have been
>recommended for us as the default character encoding type.
>Is there a particular rule of thumb about which to use, or is the
>central issue:  "either one is better than none"?
>  
>
each directive has good and bad side.

UTF-8 is quite universal, but you'll have to use html entities (such as 
"é" for "é") instead of accented (non-ascii) characters. This 
makes accented text painful to read and edit.
using 8859-1 allows you to insert accented characters in your html, 
provided they belong to the latin-1 charset . This is the solution that 
I use, because I write in French and in English only. If I wanted to use 
characters outside of the iso-8859-1 charset, (e.g. for czech) I'd have 
to use html entities or switch to UTF-8.


--Tristan
PS: I'm not an I18n guru, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

-- 
Contributeur Mozilla et OpenWebGroup
http://mozilla.org/    : Efficiency, safety and liberty for browsing.
http://openweb.eu.org/ : pour apprendre les standards.
http://standblog.com/  : un blog sur les standards.
http://pompage.net/    : de saines lectures à propos des standards.

Received on Thursday, 25 September 2003 02:51:28 UTC