Peter wrote:

Not at all! It clearly shows what happens when a page

_IS_ 8859-1 encoded but editors want to use fancy characters. Same hppens when they do it with an old browser on UTF-8 pages. So, you get trash either way,

other editors revert the same way, so you may well use utf-8, don't you? :-)

OIC. Well a person should /not/ be using fancy things like curly quotes and long hyphens because many browsers (especially on non-MS systems) display them as question makes. These should be fixed, not allowed to propagate. The fact that some browsers break these codes should be a good hint that they should not be used to begin with (esp. since ASCII quotes and regular hyphens can be used instead).

But a way around the larger issue is to sniff whether or not a browser is UTF-8-aware and then serve a page in either UTF-8 or in Latin-1 (whatever the ISO) based on that. When a UTF-8 page is displayed it shows the actual non-Latin characters, when the Latin-1 page is displayed it shows the codes the represent those characters.

That at least will prevent pages from getting damaged, but the special characters will still show up as question marks for people with older browsers, so things like curly quotes and long hyphens should be automatically converted to their ASCII counterparts.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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