- From: Phillips, Addison <addison@amazon.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:22:11 -0700
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- CC: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>, "public-i18n-core@w3.org" <public-i18n-core@w3.org>
> > > I think the world has changed significantly. In the past, setting > a > > default of UTF-8 in your browser produced mainly bad results. But, > > at least according to some measures [1], UTF-8 is rapidly > becoming > > the most reasonable default encoding on the Web. > [...] > > [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode- > 51.html > > This shows an uptake in UTF-8, but it proves nothing without data > on > how much is labeled and how much unlabeled. Uptake in labeled UTF-8 > is > awesome but doesn't affect what makes sense as the default > processing > for unlabeled data. Ah.... but this data, I'm told, is based on the encoding *after detection* by Google's crawler, not on the declaration. > > > At the same time, I think UTF-8 is more than a politically > correct > > fig leaf. The more standards and implementations stress good > > choices, the more likely people (users, content authors) are to > take > > them seriously. If you happen to have chosen UTF-8 as an encoding, > > your pages are more likely to just work. Recommending UTF-8 as a > > default probably will continue to establish itself as the right > > choice as time progresses. Remember: this is the "all else fails" > > result and is exposed to user intervention by nearly all user > agents. > > HTML 5 already recommends (labeled) UTF-8 as the default for > authoring tools. Yes, which is good, and will promote further growth of UTF-8 as a reasonable default expectation. But I admit: I'm shouting at the forest fire here. I don't expect UTF-8 to be used as a default by any user agent, at least not imminently. What's key is the rest of the wording. What I expect is that, given a few more years (HTML4 has been with us for ten years), the UTF-8 recommendation could take over the world :-). Addison Addison Phillips Globalization Architect -- Lab126 Internationalization is not a feature. It is an architecture.
Received on Thursday, 20 August 2009 07:22:51 UTC