> At 01:15 15-04-2000 -0800, Glen Perkins wrote:
> >For example, how big is the risk of using UTF-8 for the US market? It's
> >seems as though it's probably a little riskier than Latin-1, but is it
> >really? How much riskier? By "how much", I mean what percentage of visitors
> >to the site would have a problem with UTF-8 vs. what percentage would have a
> >problem with Latin-1.
>
> Only those that use very old browsers that cannot interpret UTF-8 would
> have problem if a UTF-8 encoded site only uses UTF-8 codes corresponding to
> the Latin-1 encoding.
>
I haven't done a quantitative study, but here's how I think it works. You
buy a PC and use whatever came bundled on it until the PC breaks, then you
buy another one. A small percentage of people are adventurous enough to try
downloading and installing browser or OS updates, but they quickly learn
what a bad idea that is and so never try it again. This might be less true
for professionals who have an Ethernet connection to the Internet, but the
majority of users are at home with their modems, where they do not have a
prayer of downloading those 20MB updates, especially using Browser-based
FTP, which is not restartable (hmmm, what century are we in?).
Fortunately for us, PCs only last about 2 years, and 1998-vintage browsers
do support UTF-8 :-)
- Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:02 EDT