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RE: Question about UTF-8

• To: "'Tim Bray'" <tbray@t...>, Gustaf Liljegren <gustaf.liljegren@x...>
• Subject: RE: Question about UTF-8
• From: Rob McDougall <Rob.McDougall@a...>
• Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:24:59 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

I think Tim is being unintentionally misleading.  If you stick to ISO 8859-1
then all the European characters will look fine in an editor and you can
still include non-European characters using numeric character references.

You don't need to count on never seeing non-European characters in the data,
you just won't be able to see them as glyphs in an ISO 8859-1 encoding and
they will take up a lot more space if they do appear.  You should feel
comfortable that you won't see many non-European characters in your data
before choosing ISO 8859-1 as your encoding.

Regards,
Rob
________________________________________ 
Rob McDougall
Sr. Computer Scientist
Adobe Systems Incorporated
Phone: +1 613.940.3708
Fax: +1 613.594.8886


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...] 
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 1:02 PM
To: Gustaf Liljegren
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  Question about UTF-8

[snip]

> Many users who see 'ä' when they open a UTF-8 encoded XML document in a
> text editor, prefer to use ISO 8859-1 to avoid this effect.

That only works until you need to use a character that isn't in 8859-1, 
such as those used by about two thirds of the world's population.

> Maybe the answer is to stay in ISO 8859-1 (or whatever default encoding
the
> editor has), but I was hoping it was possible to recommend using UTF-8 all
> the time (for European scripts).

The notion that you can count on never seeing non-European characters is 
a recipe for disaster in today's world.  Good solutions are: (a) as you 
suggest, use UTF-8 all the time, or (b) use XML for interchange.

-- 
Cheers, Tim Bray
         (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)

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