On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 12:09:26AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
Here's a breakdown of browsers used to save edits over a day on de.wikipedia.org. I checked de because it's the largest non-English non-UTF-8-using Wikipedia.
Total posts in the day: 2861
Browsers known to work with editing UTF-8: MSIE/Win: 1146 Gecko: 966 [549 Windows; 379 Linux/Unix; 31 Mac] Opera 6+: 331 [291 Windows; 40 Linux] Konqueror: 216 Safari: 137 total: 2796 (98%)
Browsers which can be problematic with UTF-8: old Netscape: 25 ELinks: 20 (not tested, but it's a text-mode browser and these tend to have problems in this area) MSIE/Mac: 10 Lynx: 4 (text-mode again) Opera <6: 2 total: 61 (2%)
There's some margin of error; my regexps lost track of 4 hits or so somewhere in that mess.
I'm actually surprised that the Internet Explorer/Mac quotient is so low, though it's a pleasant surprise. :)
Anyway, adding a notice and/or doing some extra conversion for those 2% shouldn't be a huge server burden.
Reasonably recent Lynx doesn't have problem with Unicode, and so I don't expect ELinks to have it either. All other problematic browsers are really ancient software, and there's nothing wrong with expecting people to upgrade. We're not the only website that doesn't support them.
Just placing a notice if problematic browes was found would suffice.