On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 10:29:25PM -0500, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Erik wrote:
Is this true? All I know is that we had a *lot* of
problems
with broken special chars on the Meta-Wiki during the logo
contest. I have no idea which browser broke them, but it
seems to be a not totally uncommon one, perhaps in the
5% range. Given that a single edit by such a person will
break an entire page, it might not be so wise to switch
(but perhaps I'm missing something -- is Meta running UTF-8?).
IIRC meta is. And that fact has created some of the problems you mention. I
therefore see no compelling need to convert Latin-1 languages to UTF-8 and in
fact think such a switch would be harmful. It is also wrong-headed to state
(as Tomasz did) that if people have non-UTF-8-friendly browsers that they
should upgrade. That is not the attitude we should have when things work just
fine the way they are (at least on the English Wikipedia - others may have
more compelling reasons to use UTF-8 that outweigh the negatives).
The only place where UTR-8 would be very useful is with interlanguage links.
But that could better be solved by placing all interlanguage links outside of
the regular wiki text of pages. That separate edit window could support UTF-8
and be shared by all Wikipedia's. This should minimize damage done by
non-UTF-8-compliant browsers and as an added benefit could be part of an
easier way to add language links to articles (inputing the links once would
create language links in every article listed in the common meta space).
1.
There are many reasons other than interwiki. ISO 8859-1 is broken by design -
it doesn't even encode all Latin characters, and other characters are also needed
for correct Latin-script typography.
2.
Things are NOT fine the way they are. At least not for English Wikipedia.
3.
And, as I said, we already break compatibility with very old browsers in many ways.
Or do you maybe want to ban all PNGs, OGGs etc., and implement some converter
from CSS to HTML3-compatible markup ?