RE: Form submission when successful controls contain characters outside the submission character set

Ian Hickson wrote:
> > It might actually be nice for the browser to warn the user when they
> > attempt to type a character outside the 8859-1 set.
> 
> I do not believe that your average user is likely to understand the
> concept of character sets, and I have no idea how I would 
> even begin to write a warning message for this issue.

Look at the Mozilla mailer.  If you try to send a message with
out-of-encoding characters, it pops up a warning: "The message you composed
contains characters not found in the selected Character Coding, so your
message may become unreadable after you send or save it."  It then offers a
choice of send anyway or cancel to fix things.  If you send anyway, the
offending chars are replaced by question marks.


> > encourage web page authors to upgrade to UTF-8.
> 
> Indeed. But that doesn't help the ISO-8859-1 case. :-(

Nothing will.  The server is not prepared to receive non-8859-1 characters,
it has to be modified.  Making it UTF-8 is no harder than dreaming up some
other convention and implementing it.  Plus, it's standard and increasingly
supported by libraries etc.

-- 
François

Received on Monday, 15 September 2003 12:27:52 UTC