Re: UTF-8 code in HTML

From: G. Adam Stanislav (adam@whizkidtech.net)
Date: Sat Apr 15 2000 - 09:36:21 EDT


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.

They already have the font for everything in Latin-1, so it matters not
that the data stream comes to them as UTF-8. The browser will convert it to
Unicode internally, and the OS will display it properly.

Personally, I oringinally used the Windows variety of Latin-1 on my old web
sites, but on anything new (e.g., every single page of
http://www.redprince.net/ ) I use UTF-8 even if all I need it for is
typographically correct quotes. And I don't even use the meta tags for it!
I have yet to receive a single complaint.

So, quite frankly, I don't see how a universal switch to UTF-8 would cause
any serious problems.

Cheers,
Adam
-----------------------------------------------------------
"I think, therefore I am."
                    - Seventeenth Century Philosophy

"I publish what I think, therefore I have."
                    - Twenty-First Century Action

Details at http://www.OnlinePublisher.net/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:02 EDT