On May 27, 2005, at 12:29, Zoltan Varady wrote:
True. I don't contest that UTF-8 is the way for the future. However I have lots of old projects I'm still working on that use iso-8859-2.
You can use iconv to convert them! :)
[...] while using UTF-8 as the encoding for my webpages often causes weirdness in some browsers
What browsers? Googling reveals that both IE 4 and NS 4 does support UTF-8 and IETF wrote in 1998:
IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages [...] Protocols MUST be able to use the UTF-8 charset, which consists of the ISO 10646 coded character set combined with the UTF-8 character encoding scheme, as defined in [10646] Annex R (published in Amendment 2), for all text.
Protocols MAY specify, in addition, how to use other charsets or other character encoding schemes for ISO 10646, such as UTF-16, but lack of an ability to use UTF-8 is a violation of this policy; such a violation would need a variance procedure ([BCP9] section 9) with clear and solid justification in the protocol specification document before being entered into or advanced upon the standards track.
source: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2277.txt
I'd be rather surprised to find a browser made in the last 7 years which doesn't handle UTF-8.
OTOH legacy encodings should be phased out, and TextMate takes an active role in doing so! :)