- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:04:33 +0300
- To: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Geoffrey Sneddon <gsneddon@opera.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>, "public-i18n-core@w3.org" <public-i18n-core@w3.org>
On Oct 14, 2009, at 18:36, Leif Halvard Silli wrote: > Henri Sivonen On 09-10-14 15.28: > >> On Oct 14, 2009, at 06:40, Leif Halvard Silli wrote: >>> I especially picked the "os_RU" locale because it is situated in >>> Russia and uses Cyrillic for everything. The ossetic alphabet >>> seems to be fully compatible with Windows 1251. >> In that case, it would probably make sense to ship Windows-1251 as >> the default for an Ossetian localization. > > Then I suppose we agree that Ian's table must not simply say that > "For all other locales, use Windows 1252 as default", right? The right rule is: The default should be the (non-UTF-8?) ASCII- superset encoding that the expected user base of the localization is most frequently going to encounter as unlabeled. The rule of defaulting to Windows-1252 when in doubt isn't a bad rule even if it may fail for Ossetian. (If you aren't in doubt that it would fail for Ossetian, don't apply the "when in doubt" rule.) >>> win1252 - bn-BD - Not Latin: Bengali Bangladesh >>> win1252 - bn-IN – Not Latin: Benagli India >> I don't have data about Bengali Web pages, but if it turns out >> that most Bengali content is labeled but that users of Bengali- >> localized browsers also read a lot of unlabeled English content, >> Windows-1252 would make sense as the default. > > But aren't English content supported by ASCII, and thus by UTF-8? English content contains "smart" dashes and quotes. > So *is* there any reason to have UTF-8 as default *anywhere*, other > than the motto "yes, let's switch to UTF-8"? None that I can think of. I'm tentatively considering the Firefox localizations that default to UTF-8 to have a bug on this point. I guess at some point I'll file bugs on them to either get them changed or to discover what I'm missing. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 13:05:12 UTC