Hi
Just some of my reflections as I've been working through changing a
big site's encoding from ISO-8891-1 to UTF-8 . . .
I've noticed in passing that it's now quite hassle to maintain a
legacy encoding based web application. (i.e. Ascii based like
ISO-8859-1).
Although Active4D's default output charset is still supports legacy
mode, there are lots of places where UTF-8 just spills out unless you
actually write code to stop it (not least because way upstream,
content writers are unconsciously using text editors which default to
UTF-8).
For example,
- A4D Execute BLOB - assumes the blob being executed contains UTF-8
encoded text.
- Write Blob - likeways
These caught me out because I programatically sometimes load bits of
script and 'inject' them into the main page. If the script has an
executable suffix (.a4d) then it's executed before inclusion.
Also, the main data source for dynamic sites (the 4D v11 database) has
all been converted to UTF-16 whether we are running in Ascii mode or
not.
All this has made me realise how utterly obsolete legacy encodings
suddenly are (as well as how great UTF-8 is at rendering Cherokee :).
Just an observation in case anyone is busy trying to 'shore up' their
converted code to maintain ISO-8859-1. My suggestion is - forget it &
switch to UTF-8. Life seems a lot easier. The word 'liberation'
springs to mind.
Regards
Peter
P.S. Tip - remember to use 'UTF8 text without length' in your 'blob-to-
text' and 'text-to-blob' commands to allow things to flow freely.
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