Paul on 31 Mar 2004 22:10:04 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] UTF-8, Second Opinion


gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

I should probably have been more specific: I'm speaking only of
terminals, and am OUTRAGED at the frequency with which Red Hat
decides to change their defaults (breaking, surely irrelevant,
things... like perl Makefile.PL).




OK. If we limit the question about UTF-8 to graphical Web browsers and e-mail clients, then is the use of UTF-8 for character coding of Web pages and e-mail a good thang? And, if a Web page or e-mail does not specify its encoding, is UTF-8 a reasonable default?


I guess if you're running a text-based browser or e-mail client in a terminal, you might not like the use of UTF-8, right?

In my case, I'm concerned about "internationality" (I think I just created that word.) and my ability to send and view Japanese text in addition to English text. There are Japanese encodings such as ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP, and Shift_JIS. But, if UTF-8 can handle "all" languages, isn't better to not worry about regional encodings and use the theoretically universal encoding?
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