page encoding question - thank you

[Tony Vella]

Thank you very much to all who replied. I think I will leave well enough
alone for now and not bother re-encoding the whole mess.

This UTF-8 routine of mine started when I was talking to a local chap and he
mentioned that he had visited one of the major automobile manufacturer's web
site and discovered that all their pages were encoded UTF-8 ... Ford-Jaguar,
I think??? So, I figured that if UTF-8 was good enough for a nice little
earner like F-J, it should do quite nicely for me, thank you. Then, when I
already had a bunch of pages done, another chap comes up and sells me a pup
about the extreme limitations of UTF-8. Oh well, learn something new every
day!

Once again, thanks a bunch.

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

Thank you very much to all who replied. I think I will leave well enough
alone for now and not bother re-encoding the whole mess.

This UTF-8 routine of mine started when I was talking to a local chap and he
mentioned that he had visited one of the major automobile manufacturer's web
site and discovered that all their pages were encoded UTF-8 ... Ford-Jaguar,
I think??? So, I figured that if UTF-8 was good enough for a nice little
earner like F-J, it should do quite nicely for me, thank you. Then, when I
already had a bunch of pages done, another chap comes up and sells me a pup
about the extreme limitations of UTF-8. Oh well, learn something new every
day!

Once again, thanks a bunch.

I imagine that the choice depends on which languages are used on the same
website or at least on the same page.
You could not use iso-8859-1 for Chinese as far as I know...and if the page
contains a part in Chinese and a part in a European language what could I
use instead of UTF-8 and which were more effective as well?
On the other hand, if you only use West-european languages, I guess that
iso-8859-1 would do the job.

 

[Toby Inkster]

You could not use iso-8859-1 for Chinese as far as I know...

Well, you *can*, but you'll need to use numeric character references
instead of just typing in the characters directly.

That is, the following is OK in utf-8:

<p>你好</p>

But in iso-8859-1 you'd have to resort to something ugly like:

<p>你好</p>