Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 12/20/05 18:14

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, David Dorward wrote:

> Tony Vella wrote:
>
> > I am preparing a series of philatelic html pages (lots of text and
> > a few scans of stamps) which will include alpha-characters
> > (accents) in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Danish. The
> > pages I have finished in draft form so far I have encoded UTF-8
> > but I have just been told that 99% of the world will not be able
> > to read them
>
> That is rubbish.

Agreed

> UTF-8 is very well supported (so much so, that I can't remember the
> last time I came across a system that couldn't handle it).

Broad agreement with that, but there are exceptions...

Well, Netscape 4.* versions do a pretty good job of *rendering* utf-8,
but do keep in mind that, if any form submission is required, then NN4
badly mangles utf-8. Whether it's worth understanding how to
implement a workaround for that old zombie is debatable, of course:
I'm just mentioning that it's not without a problem.

cheers

(The original WebTV is also hopeless at rendering anything other than
a subset of Windows-1252, but ho hum.)

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