Hello everybody, On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 10:36:32AM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
[...] > Personally, I'm very much in favor of switching PmWiki's default > to utf8 -- it will bring us some huge benefits -- but the big > obstacle is that migrating existing sites from the old iso-8859-1 > default to a utf8 default may be somewhat complicated and/or > problematic. Thus I'm seeking comments and opinions. [...] > The big problem is that any existing pages of an iso-8859-1 > site will have been saved using an iso-8859-1 encoding, using > iso-8859-1 encoded filenames. Thus, it's not just a simple > matter of changing a configuration option -- we also have to > convert the various page files as well. In Italian we use some accented characters (à, è, é, ì, ...) I think a charset change would be a major step for every PmWiki-based Italian site. Same thing for French, German... As a regular UTF-8 user (you can see it by this e-mail :-) I personally think that the whole Internet should switch to UTF-8. But I'm seeing also not a very good support of this charset, on some systems. I'm afraid that some web servers or FTP clients may not accept filenames encoded in UTF-8. I hope someone can contradict me! :-) > So, what I'm seeing at the moment is that if we switch to using > utf8 by default, admins of existing sites have to be notified > somehow that the default has changed and told how to configure > the site to continue using iso-8859-1, or given a procedure to > somehow convert the site's pages to utf8. And once someone > starts the utf8 conversion, it can get a bit messy to try to > convert back. Yes, I think that a big red label should be in the upgrade instructions, with pointer to a recipe or something that explains how to convert page text. I don't know about page names, though... :-/ > Any thoughts on the overall process, how much of an impact a move > like this might have on existing sites, or how we might go about this? As I told before, I think this would be a major issue for the interested web sites. But I think that it's an important step that has to be made some day, the sooner the better. I think that this should be strongly encouraged. I suggest to do the first test with the PmWiki localized documentation: that's a good ready-made example of foreign language text! :-) About how to implement a charset conversion, the only idea I have is to use something like html_entity_decode(htmlentities(text)). I'm afraid that the filenames' conversion could only be left to each site admin. These were my two cents. -- rigo http://rigo.altervista.org _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
