On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 9:42 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
It doesn't -- that's the default of your browser. (Unless your browser is Safari, in which case it defaults to a Sans Serif font.)
Thanks. That was the source of my confusion.
MediaWiki uses Unicode UTF-8 encoding for all input/output, including URL formatting. The UTF-8 bytes in the URLs are then encoded per spec (that is, as URI-compatible IRIs).
In many cases you can still link to your wiki from outside using a non-Unicode encoding... "incoming" URLs which are detected as not being valid UTF-8 are assumed to be in a language-specific encoding (defined in the language file; for Arabic this will be windows-1256).
Conversion is then applied to get the data into Unicode -- but this will probably only work properly for non-Western encodings when PHP's iconv extension is available.
Thanks Brion.
I'm trying hard to implement IRIs support for my wiki site, which is still under development. The percent-espace part of a non-UTF8 encoded URI is really really unfriendly. The browsers support for IRIs varies considerable albeit all them (except IE6 which needs an add-on for that) are claiming built-in IRIs/IDNs support (I don't care about IDNs for now). The best being Opera which displays IRIs just perfectly (you can check it on the Arabic Wikipedia). IE7 also has built-in IRIs support but it doesn't work no matter what I've done. I have the right settings in Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced: Send UTF-8 URLs, but still it doesn't work!
Firefox support it by setting the value of "network.standard-url.encode-utf8" in about:config to true (default is false), but yet again it doesn't work!
WikiMedia URLs are not just paths to files or articles; actually one can learn many things about MediaWiki's structure and architecure by looking at a URL, and that's why I'm persistant in getting them to work.
I've done all these tests on a latest version 1.11.1 MediaWiki installed on a localhost dev server, and iconv is installed ane enabled. I'm clueless as to what should I do.