[poll] which charset

[nose]

Hi,
A little poll for the week-end:
Which charset do you use for your website(s):
utf-8?
iso-8859-1 (...)?
other?
just don't care?
What charset is better now, say, for European languages like french, german,
spanish...

[David Ross]

nose wrote:

Hi,
A little poll for the week-end:
Which charset do you use for your website(s):
utf-8?
iso-8859-1 (...)?
other?
just don't care?
What charset is better now, say, for European languages like french, german,
spanish...

I use ISO-8859-1 except for a few pages where I'm demonstrating the
use of escape sequences and character references. Those two or
three pages validate only with WINDOWS-1252.

--

David E. Ross
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/>

I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
complies with Web standards. See <URL:http://www.mozilla.org/>.

[Tim]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 00:36:29 +0100, nose wrote:

Which charset do you use for your website(s): utf-8?
iso-8859-1 (...)?
US-ASCII. I don't have any easy way to type anything other than those
characters, so anything beyond it has been typed in using character
references.
What charset is better now, say, for European languages like french,
german, spanish...

Theoretically, if you want to use non-ASCII characters directly, UTF-8.
You've got one scheme which should cover all languages, and not various
different ones with various degrees of proper support, and avoiding a
possible need to use multiple different charsets within a website.

--
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[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, nose wrote:

A little poll for the week-end:
Oh dear. Is this a technical question or a popularity contest?
Which charset do you use for your website(s):
On the whole, I follow my own advice
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist

Following scenario 1 or 2 when possible; 5 when appropriate; and
scenario 6 or 7 when necessary.
What charset is better now, say, for European languages like french,
german, spanish...

iso-8859-1 is more compact. If you don't care about Netscape 4 any
more, you can also include occasional non-Latin characters when
necessary by &#number; notation. Don't use iso-8859-15. utf-8 isn't
wrong by any means, but it's less compact if the majority of the
content is Latin-1.

There are plenty of ways of converting "by rote" from one
representation to another. For example Mozilla Composer can save the
document with a different encoding, and will adapt to and from
&-notations as needed. For another example there's free recode. So
you can author documents in whichever encoding you find convenient,
and then serve them out in whichever encoding you think best meets
your readers' needs.

[Henri Sivonen]

In article <Pi************ *************** ***@ppepc56.ph. gla.ac.uk>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

What charset is better now, say, for European languages like french,
german, spanish...

iso-8859-1 is more compact.

However, UTF-8 is easier to deal with if there are forms (assuming you
have a library that does Unicode normalization). With ISO-8859-1 user
can enter characters that aren't representable as ISO-8859-1.

I use UTF-8 in NFC on output and accept UTF-8 as input and normalize it
to NFC up front.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:

In article <Pi************ *************** ***@ppepc56.ph. gla.ac.uk>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

iso-8859-1 is more compact.
However, UTF-8 is easier to deal with if there are forms

Good point. (I have a page on that issue too ;-)
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...form-i18n.html
(assuming you have a library that does Unicode normalization). With
ISO-8859-1 user can enter characters that aren't representable as
ISO-8859-1.

Indeed, and with some bizarre consequences.

So yes, if i18n forms input is to be expected, then one of the options
which get sent out as utf-8 certainly have some advantages (scenarios
6 and 7 on my checklist page).

But here too, Netscape 4 will have to be left behind.

[Henri Sivonen]

In article <Pi************ *************** ***@ppepc56.ph. gla.ac.uk>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

ISO-8859-1.

Indeed, and with some bizarre consequences.

So yes, if i18n forms input is to be expected, then one of the options
which get sent out as utf-8 certainly have some advantages (scenarios
6 and 7 on my checklist page).

But here too, Netscape 4 will have to be left behind.

But Netscape 4.x users can still use the ISO-8859-1 repertoire with
UTF-8 forms, so I do not see Netscape 4.x as a reason for using
ISO-8859-1 over UTF-8.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:

But here too, Netscape 4 will have to be left behind.

But Netscape 4.x users can still use the ISO-8859-1 repertoire with
UTF-8 forms, so I do not see Netscape 4.x as a reason for using
ISO-8859-1 over UTF-8.

Aha, I see your point. I had written:

| It's true that Latin-1 characters can be typed-in (or pasted in from
| other windows that are using iso-8859-1 or windows-1252 coding), but
| that isn't particularly useful, after all, because if you only wanted
| Latin-1, you wouldn't be likely to choose utf-8 coding.

which is true as far as it goes, but your interpretation is also
valid, in the terms you put it. Thanks for the insight!

[L�ʻie Techie]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 00:36:29 +0100, nose wrote:

Hi,
A little poll for the week-end:
Which charset do you use for your website(s): utf-8?
iso-8859-1 (...)?
other?
just don't care?
What charset is better now, say, for European languages like french,
german, spanish...

I use UTF-8 when dealing with Hawaiian or if I'm expecting form input from
multiple languages.

La'ie Techie

[Pierre Goiffon]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

Don't use iso-8859-15. utf-8 isn't
wrong by any means, but it's less compact if the majority of the
content is Latin-1.

Why don't use Iso Latin-9 ? Nowdays we can't anymore keep iso Latin-1
(euro sign of course, not very easy to deal with it as an entity on a
whole website). And iso latin-9 as the same advantage over utf-8 than
iso latin-1 : it's more compact. And, by the way, not everyone needs
Unicode as lots of website only contains texts written in latin script
languages. So I keep wondering : why don't use ISO Latin-9 ?