charsets again
Wojtek Sylwestrzak (W.Sylwestrzak@icm.edu.pl)
Wed, 11 Jun 1997 18:51:59 +0200 (MET DST)
>
> The WWW initiated the good practice to rely on a single encoding
> at least for a single region, whith choosing iso-8859-1 for
> western Europe. Unfortunately, this practice hasn't been followed
> in other areas. In each area, there are unfortunately several
> encodings by which that area is served well. And it's difficult
> to decide on one. In some cases, that's not that much of a problem,
> all browsers that know Japanese know how to accept any of the
> three major encodings of Japanese. In other cases, it's much
> worse. For example, Internet Explorer on the Mac lists iso-8859-3
> for Turkish. Netscape on a Sun lists iso-8859-9. Other such examples
> abound.
>
I wonder, do you feel that an informational document on this would be useful ?
(this could in fact even expand a little more into recommendations for
email and usenet articles charsets.)
Nobody questions iso-8859-1 today, beacuse it's clearly there in the specs.
however http standard still remains a little vague, about other charsets,
saying that iso-8859-x are good, but anything registered with IANA
is almost equally good (as long as it comlplies with MIME).
This results in people arguing that it's proper to use e.g. Windows-cp1250,
because most of the platforms run Windows anyway etc.
This situation is under some control in Poland, but in some other countries
(like Czech Rep.) it's a mess.
Do you think that trying to enforce single charset for single area
(like Western Europe, Central Europe etc) is a good thing ?
I think so. But I lack good ideas on how to do it...
--wojtek