On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, 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 did the actual check for Lynx. Lynx does a commendable job at reading UTF-8 (mapping each character to the closest transcription into Latin-1), but editing with it will cause disasters (it will send the output in the same way, thus with all non-Latin-1 characters changed to their closest Latin-1 equivalent).
Although I do like to have UTF-8 (recently had to add dots that do not belong there on 'Hisarlik' in my nl:-article on Schliemann), I also think that 2% of our userbase is large enough a group to not just get rid of or allow to inadvertently destruct pages.
Andre Engels