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

Received on Wednesday, 30 August 2000 19:34:19 UTC