A quick review of coding on BBC World Service pages in diverse languages at http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/ reveals . a diversity of charset codes used, with most pages *not* in utf-8. I suspect that BBC is anticipating the kinds of systems that users in each language population will rely on, trying to accommodate the least sophisticated systems and font repertoires. Assuming that their read is accurate (and that they're not just being just conservative about making the change to utf-8), this would seem to be an interesting window on how widespread the use of Unicode is or is not at the present time. On the other hand, it is worth noting that no Latin-based orthography is displayed on bbc.co.uk in utf-8, even when characters beyond Latin-1 are used (Turkish) or should be used (Hausa). If one had the time, it would be interesting to look also at other international radio sites - VOA, RFI, Deutsche Welle, Radio China, etc.
Among the questions I have are whether we can expect that all web content (at least on high profile international sites) will eventually go to utf-8 or another Unicode rendering or will various non-Unicode 8-bit standards continue to hold sway in selected areas for some time to come? I think that in the "ecology" of localization in a region such as West Africa, the use or non-use of utf-8 by international websites for a language like Hausa (which basically is the difference between being able to use the formal orthography or resorting to an ASCIIfied transcription as they currently do) certainly has an effect on the way that that language and others are used in text offline. At what point does the argument that too many local systems in a region do not have unicode fonts lose its validity, and at what point should organizations like BBC take the leadership in use of utf-8 (as it did a while back with a Unicode font for Urdu)? BBC lists 32 languages, but two of them - Kinyarwanda and Kirundi - lead to the same "Great Lakes" page (the two languages are interintelligible). Also for the sake of this list, I count Portuguese only once, even though BBC has Brazilian and African varieties separate. Hence the total below comes to 30. Albanian charset=windows-1250 Arabic charset=windows-1256 Azeri charset=utf-8 Bangla charset=utf-8 Burmese charset=utf-8 Chinese charset=gb2312 English (Caribbean) charset=iso-8859-1 French charset=iso-8859-1 Hausa charset=iso-8859-1 Hindi charset=utf-8 Indonesian charset=iso-8859-1 Kinyarwanda (& Kirundi) charset=iso-8859-1 Kyrgyz charset=utf-8 Macedonian charset=windows-1251 Nepali charset=utf-8 Pashto charset=utf-8 Persian charset=utf-8 Portuguese (both Brazilian and African) charset=iso-8859-1 Russian charset=windows-1251 Serbian charset=windows-1250 Sinhala charset=utf-8 Somali charset=iso-8859-1 Spanish charset=iso-8859-1 Swahili charset=iso-8859-1 Tamil charset=utf-8 Turkish charset=charset=windows-1254 Ukranian charset=windows-1251 Urdu charset=utf-8 Uzbek charset=utf-8 Vietnamese charset=utf-8 Totals: 13 utf-8 9 iso-8859-1 3 windows-1251 2 windows-1250 1 windows-1254 1 windows-1256 1 gb2312
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