Re: Publishing in UTF-8?

Lenny,

You might want to take a look at Jukka Korpela's discussion of non-ASCII
characters in HTML:

http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/HTML/chars.html

Regards,
Andrea

Lenny Turetsky wrote:
> 
> 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

Received on Friday, 1 September 2000 20:19:16 UTC