Re: Unicode encoding for web pages

Deborah Cawkwell wrote:

> For web pages, would you consider using a Unicode encoding
> other than UTF-8, eg UTF-16? If so, why? or why not?

Not, because BE vs. LE causes me headaches.  HTML 4 or later
pages are (conceptually) always translated to Unicode.  If
you need almost always only Latin-1, you could use it, and
for the remaining char.s use symbolic or numeric character
references like € / € / € (W3C recommends
the latter, but some old Netscape browsers don't like hex.)

Latin-1 plus a few character references might be even shorter
than UTF-8.  For radical backwards compatibility or radical
"compression" you could try Windows-1252 instead of Latin-1.

Some really old browsers know Windows-1252 but not Unicode.
For these really old browsers UTF-16 would fail miserably.
OTOH if your input is UTF-16 you maybe don't care and just
use it as is.
             Bye, Frank

Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 01:44:07 UTC