[timmerk]

Hi,

I understand the concept behind text encodings, but yet, I still have some questions...

On my webpages and MySQL database that everyone on every platform can view, should I use:

Western (iso-8859-1)
UTF-8 with BOM
UTF-8 without BOM
Mac Roman

? What are the differences? Is there any compatibility issues? I want to display English and Spanish characters mostly, but want everyone to be able to view it.

What is BOM by the way?

Thanks!

[larkost]

If you are using non-English (non-ASCII 7) characters, then you definitely want everything in the chain using UTF (UTF-8 being a very good choice %95 of the time). You definitely do not want to be using iso-8859-1 which IE has a whole set of exceptions in (screws everyone up).

In UTF lingo 'BOM' is 'Byte Order Mark' which is used to tell programs that the file is UTF and whether it is big-endian or little-endian (the x86 instruction set used by intel stored things in the opposite direction as most every other instruction set). You don't usually need this when dealing with the web.

[wataru]

If some program you use doesn't support UTF-8, then maybe you shouldn't use it. But I think that's pretty rare, and there's really no reason not to use UTF-8 otherwise. Even if you only plan to use English, using UTF-8 gives you a lot more flexibility in case you change your mind, plus you can use lots of dingbats and icons available in the Character Palette that otherwise might not come out right.

[larkost]

wataru: using the icongraphs in the extended set for web work is not a good idea as Windows standard fonts do not cover those UTF ranges in many cases. If you need a non-letter character, do it with an in-line image instead.

[wataru]

Originally posted by larkost:
wataru: using the icongraphs in the extended set for web work is not a good idea as Windows standard fonts do not cover those UTF ranges in many cases. If you need a non-letter character, do it with an in-line image instead.

Good point. Sorry.

[timmerk]

So do all browsers support UTF-8?

[larkost]

Originally posted by timmerk:
So do all browsers support UTF-8?

UTF-8 should work with all modern browsers, and was designed so the the standard English characters will appear even on those that don't. Windows does have a bit of a problem in that the standard font's don't cover much range (Chinese, Japanese, etc...), but it doesn't sound like you are going to run into that.

[wataru]

I believe all modern operating systems come with good enough fonts to display most languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. That means Win2k, OS X 10.0, and up. On earlier versions of Windows it should prompt you to install a font pack if it finds characters your current fonts can't handle.

[timmerk]

What kind of encoding should I have for text files I make in BBedit - I use it for text files and programming code that needs to work in every OS. Should I use Latin 1 or 9 or something else? I would have used UTF-8, but already PHP is messing it up when read.