From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Jan 15 2004 - 10:53:37 EST
Edward H. Trager <ehtrager at umich dot edu> wrote:
> Given the maturity of support for Unicode in the various relevant
> technologies(web servers, web browsers, XML, Javascript, Java, etc...)
> and the global nature of the marketplace, it seems to me that it is
> high time that web servers default to serving UTF-8 instead of
> ISO-8859-1. The W3C should really stipulate UTF-8 as the default.
>
> In the case of Apache, it is trivial to change the configuration file
> to UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 (I even remember that it's around line
> 780 something in the default configuration file distributed with
> Apache version 2.x), but I wish it was the DEFAULT. In the case of
> IIS (the server used for serving the form which was highlighted as
> having the problem at the beginning of this thread), I would assume
> that it would also not be difficult to set the configuration file, but
> I don't have first-hand knowledge about how to do that. In any case,
> UTF-8 should be the default for IIS and all the other servers out
> there.
On Apache servers, if you don't have control of the server, you can
overcome this problem by adding a file called .htaccess to each
directory containing HTML pages. The file must contain the following
line:
AddType "text/html; charset=UTF-8" html
My Web pages were temporarily broken a few months ago when Adelphia
"upgraded" to a new version of Apache whose config files specified the
ISO 8859-1 default. Previously the UTF-8 declarations on my pages were
sufficient to get the pages served correctly, but now everything is
served as ISO 8859-1 (regardless of encoding declaration) unless an
.htaccess file is configured as shown above. Defaulting to ISO 8859-1
like this, when the world is moving to Unicode, is a major step backward
in my opinion.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jan 15 2004 - 11:43:06 EST