On 12/1/2011 2:00 PM, L. David Baron wrote:
On Thursday 2011-12-01 14:37 +0900, Mark Callow wrote:
On 01/12/2011 11:29, L. David Baron wrote:
The default varies by localization (and within that potentially by
platform), and unfortunately that variation does matter.
In my experience this is what causes most of the breakage. It leads
people to create pages that do not specify the charset encoding. The
page works fine in the creator's locale but shows mojibake (garbage
characters) for anyone in a different locale.
If the default was ASCII everywhere then all authors would see mojibake,
unless it really was an ASCII-only page, which would force them to set
the charset encoding correctly.
Sure, if the default were consistent everywhere we'd be fine. If we
have a choice in what that default is, UTF-8 is probably a good
choice unless there's some advantage to another one. But nobody's
figured out how to get from here to there.
How about a "Compatibility Mode" for the older non-UTF-8 character set
approach, specific to page? I wholeheartedly agree that something
should be done here, preventing yet more content from piling up in
outdated ways without any consequences. (Same with email clients too, I
would hope as well.)
Brett
