Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/26/45 11:52

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Andy Dingley wrote:

> On Sat, 8 Jul 2006 15:37:30 +0300, "Jukka K. Korpela"
> <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
>
> >That's a good idea, partly because the English and Greek pages
> >probably have different character encodings,

There are *many* different ways to handle that: it would be difficult
to offer advice - even for this relatively limited requirement - that
would fit every situation.[1]

> I'd keep it to one character encoding throughout - editing is too
> error prone otherwise.

It's by no means essential to author in the same encoding as the
server will be serving out. As any long-standing Mac user would
be able to confirm.

Am I to assume you're hinting at using utf-8 throughout? If so, then
that's problably quite reasonable nowadays - and has benefits in terms
of any form submissions (using text/textarea) which might be involved.
But I don't think it's the only feasible choice.

Back when I produced [2]
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/quick.en , and Panos
Stokas produced a translation
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/quick.el , we didn't
really have that choice - there were still too many old browsers
around for it to be helpful to serve-out utf-8 encoding.

(Use the URL http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/quick to
negotiate your preferred variant).

By the way, if you *do* use utf-8 then the file sizes will be larger
than if you used the language-appropriate 8bit coding such as
iso-8859-7 for Greek. However, that's no big deal, and anyone who
worried about file sizes to that extent could gzip the files (widely
supported by browsers now), or use mod_gzip to accommodate also those
few which didn't.

cheers

[1] At risk of blowing my own trumpet, I'd suggest picking one of
the options set out in my
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist ,
having regard to any local constraints and issues in making that
choice.

[2] On reviewing these old pages, I see that I've omitted to take my
own later advice, to provide explicit links between the different
language variants. Nobody's perfect...

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