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Re: perl unicode support


IMO these days all browsers should come with their default encoding set to UTF-8 - and all HTML / XHTML editors should insert UTF-8 as the default charset when creating new pages. If a user wants to go and change this OK but usually there is no very good reason for creating a page using any other encoding. Unicode is after all defined as the base character set for HTML 4.0 and above.

Similarly all Linux distributions should use UTF-8 locales as the default - and if a user wants to select a non UTF-8 locale at install time they should probably receive some kind of mild warning.

- Chris

Egmont Koblinger wrote:

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 04:24:39PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:

Hi,

Using accented characters in your own language has always been
possible with legacy codepage locales

Of course.

The only thing that's not
possible in legacy codepage locales is handling text from other
languages that need characters not present in your codepage.


You say it's not possible??? Just launch firefox/opera/konqueror/whatever
modern browser with a legacy locale and see whether it displays all foreign
letters. It _does_, though you believe it's "not possible".

It may display some of them incorrectly because of the overlap of characters 128 -> 255 in that codepage and characters Unicode defines in that range. Unless your using an east asian codpage, most browsers now treat anything beyond 255 as a Unicode character.

But let's reverse the whole story. I write a homepage in Hungarian, using
either latin2 or utf8 charset. Someone who lives in West Europe, America,
Asia, the Christmas Island... anywhere else happens to visit this page. It's
not only important for him, it's also important for me that my accents get
displayed correctly there, under a locale unknown to me. And luckily that's
how all good browsers work. I can't see why you're reasoning that this
should't (or mustn't?) work.


At this point anyone who wants multilingual text support should be
using UTF-8 natively,


At this point everyone should be using UTF-8 natively. But not everybody
does.
....



--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/